Masters Theses
Date of Award
5-2023
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science
Major
Aerospace Engineering
Major Professor
Paul P. Palies
Committee Members
Paul P. Palies, Trevor Moeller, Mark Gragston
Abstract
All combustion systems from large scale power plants to the engines of cars to gas turbines in aircraft are looking for new fuel sources. Recently, clean energy for aviation has come into the foreground as an important issue due to the environment impacts of current combustion methods and fuels used. The aircraft industry is looking towards hydrogen as a new, powerful, and clean fuel of the future. However there are several engineering and scientific challenges to overcome before hydrogen can be deployed into the industry. These issues
range from storing the hydrogen in a viable cryogenic form for an aircraft to stably burning the hydrogen in different phases during flight. Since a fundamental aspect, the fuel source (usually kerosene), is being switched to hydrogen, extensive modeling and ground testing of a future engine is required before a gas turbine engine can be retrofitted to work with hydrogen or built from the ground up. Modeling and simulating turbofan engine components can complement the engineering design process by allowing designs to be tested before being
implemented into an actual turbofan engine. This allows an engineer to build confidence around a given design. Actual testing of gas turbine engines and their turbomachinery components is expensive and modeling these devices can help mitigate some of the cost and reduce potentially fatal errors in the design of the engine. In this thesis, several models are developed that allow for the study of hydrogen in a laboratory environment, and are compared to past works, industry software and data. This includes a 0D turbofan engine model and computational fluid dynamics simulations of a laboratory scale burner. The results formed in this work establish that the initial design of the burner and codes developed
here can serve as a foundation for future experiments and aid in the pursuit of achieving agas turbine engine operating with hydrogen-air mixtures.
Recommended Citation
Caulfield, Christopher James, "Enabling Premixed Hydrogen-Air Combustion for Aeroengines via Laboratory Experiment Modeling. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2023.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/9202
Included in
Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics Commons, Aeronautical Vehicles Commons, Heat Transfer, Combustion Commons, Other Aerospace Engineering Commons, Propulsion and Power Commons