Nicholas GIBBONS, Vincent WHEATLEY

DOI Number: N/A

Conference number: HiSST-2025-231

Oxygen enrichment is the addition of small amounts of gaseous oxygen to the fuel of a hypersonic vehicle, to promote vigorous combustion and prevent extinction in difficult conditions. In this work, a preliminary numerical study has been performed to evaluate the prospects of using oxygen enrichment in high Mach number Scramjets, the kind developed for access to space, where the engine must operate through a large range of Mach numbers and atmospheric conditions. A previously published flowpath, the Mach 12 REST scramjet, has been chosen as a baseline geometry, and simulated with and without oxygen enrichment at conditions matching an experimental tunnel test. These numerical
simulations are performed using the University of Queensland’s compressible flow solver Eilmer, which uses a Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov approach to solve the steady-state, reacting, Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations on an unstructured, hexahedral grid in a highly parallel fashion. The results show good agreement with the experiments in the cases with no oxygen enrichment, and encouraging improvements in the combustion behaviour with added oxygen. In addition, we present the development of a quasi-1D meta-model of the flowpath that can be used for systems-level studies of oxygen enrichment that are planned for future work.

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In Categories: 1.Events, 1.HiSST 2025, Propulsion Systems & Components
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