Research Of Slotted Swirler Annular Combustor

The aero-engine, known as the “heart” of the aircraft, is the main power plant of themodern aviation aircraft. As one of the three pivotal components of aero-engine, thecombustion chamber is employed to make sure that the fuel chemical energy could beconverted into heat energy normally at variable flight conditions. Due to the workingenvironment in aero-engine combustion chamber is very harsh and the working processis also more complex than the other components in engine, the technical level of thecombustor has become the key factor which constraints development of the aviationengine. If the combustion of fuel in combustor is more adequate, the more chemicalenergy will be released, the more kinetic energy will be obtained by the gas, and theefficiency of the engine will be higher naturally. Therefore the burning state of the fuel incombustion chamber is relevant to the improvement of the working performance of theaero-engine.Swirl combustion could enhance the fuel’s burning effectively, and is an importantway to improve the thrust-weight ratio and working performance. As one of the pivotalcomponents of swirl combustion chamber, the swirler will produce great influence on theperformance of combustor. In this paper, we present a new type of slotted swirler whichsuits to main combustion chamber. Both the experiment and numerical simulation areemployed for the research on the combustion performance in slotted swirler annularchamber. The CFD software FLUENT is used to analyze the flow field characteristicsand temperature field characteristics in slotted swirler annular chamber. Then bycomparing the simulation results with those of a normal seamless swirler, one can seethat compared to the seamless annular combustor, slotted swirler annular combustor hasthe longer recirculation zone, lower turbulent and smaller flow resistance; the maincombustion zone has the higher burning temperature and the duty flame has betterstability; the flame tube has the more reasonable temperature distribution, the combustion of fuel is more adequate and the fuel efficiency is increased greatly.In addition, we conduct an experiment to analyze the difference of the flow fielddistribution and the temperature field distribution between the slotted swirler combustorand seamless combustor under the same test conditions. The results showed that, theslotted swirler annular combustor has some advantages in lower flow resistance,bettercombustion stability and higher combustion efficiency.The research turns out that, this new type of slotted swirler annular combustor hascertain superiority in terms of combustion performance, moreover it provides a newtechnical approach to improve the performance of the main combustion chamber.