| Scramjet engines propelled at hypersonic velocities have the potential to replace existing rocket launchers. Commercializing the vehicle is an arduous task, owing to issues relating to low combustion efficiency. The performance, thrust, and speed of the engine can be improved by optimizing: turbulence-chemistry interaction to provide mixing conditions favorable for the chemistry, pressure buildup, and re-circulation of hydrogen throughout the engine. The performance of the engine can be measured, flow and chemical dynamics can be evaluated when all three variables in the transport equations are known. The variables are instantaneous flow velocity, static temperature (refers to the macroscopic temperature and not the molecular species temperature), and total number density at a point in the flow. The motive is to build a non-intrusive tool to measure thermodynamic quantities (static temperature and total number density). This can be integrated with a velocity measurement tool, in the future, to obtain all three variables simultaneously and instantaneously.;The dissertation describes in detail the motivation for the proposed work, with introduction to the formalism involved, with a concise literature review, followed by mathematical perspective to obtain the working equations for temperature and number density. The design of the adiabatic burner and the experimental setup used for calibration is discussed with the uncertainty involved in measurements. The measurements are made for a certain set of flow conditions in the laminar burner by Raman scattering and is validated by comparing it to the theoretical/adiabatic flame temperature and mole fraction plots, in lean and rich regime. This technique is applied to turbulent, supersonic, hydrogen-air flame of an afterburning rocket nozzle. The statistics of temperature and total number density versus the corresponding values at adiabatic conditions gives the departure from thermal and chemical equilibrium. The extent of mixing and combustion can be concluded from such statistics. The future work will involve experimental modifications to make line and planar measurements in combusting jets. |
