Department of Engineering / News / Clean engines on the front burner

Department of Engineering

Clean engines on the front burner

Clean engines on the front burner

Dr Matthew Juniper, Mike Hield and Robert Llewellyn

The Engineer magazine Technology and Innovation Awards returned to The Royal Society to celebrate the 2009 most successful UK engineering projects.

The event, sponsored by BAE Systems and hosted by Scrapheap Challenge and Red Dwarf star, Robert Llewellyn, saw winners in seven categories receive awards for ground-breaking technologies as a result of collaboration between universities and industry.

The award for Environmental Technology was received by the Department's Dr Matthew Juniper and Rolls-Royce, who have jointly developed a software tool that can help in the design of cleaner jet engines.

The article on InstaFlow below, appeared in a special awards edition of The Engineer magazine.

Researchers have joined forces in an attempt to work out how jet engines can be operated using more air and less fuel. Jet engines are a simple concept but a complex reality. Sometimes described as 'a bucket that you burn fuel in', their precisely machined components and painstakingly chosen materials are designed to eke as much of the energy embodied in the fuel into the force that propels aircraft through the air.

Making these engines as environmentally friendly as possible is also a complicated matter. As well as carbon dioxide, jet engines can produce poisonous oxides of nitrogen (NOx) under certain conditions. Understanding the complex interplays of gas flows, combustion and temperature that give rise to these conditions - and then finding out how to avoid them - is a daunting prospect, which Matthew Juniper of Cambridge University took on with the assistance of Rolls-Royce.

'If you want to operate cleaner, with low NOx production, you need to burn with lots of air and less fuel,' he said. 'Having lots of air keeps the temperature down in the combustion chamber and it's high temperatures that give rise to the NOx; essentially, you start burning the nitrogen in the air. So you want to burn colder, but of course the colder it is, the harder it is to keep a flame going.'

To make sure their engine is burning lean and not producing NOx, engine designers must ensure that the fuel and air are mixed as well as possible. Otherwise, the regions that are richer in fuel will burn hotter and the resulting high temperature will lead to NOx generation. However, the small ratio of fuel to air causes other problems. The conditions put the flame on the very edge of instability. 'Everyone who cooks with gas burners has seen this effect,' said Juniper. 'If your pan boils over and blocks up half the holes, the other holes start to burn much faster and then, as the blocked holes clear, you get an oscillating effect across the burner as the flames grow and shrink until they settle back down.

'In a jet engine combustion chamber, you get pressure waves that can interact with the flame in the same sort of way,' he added. 'The flame comes from the fuel injector into the combustion chamber and a pressure wave hits it and perturbs it. A little later, the flame will give out a bit more heat, which will increase NOx generation. If you're unlucky, the heat release comes at just the wrong moment and adds to the oscillation, and that can lock into the resonances of the combustion chamber. That's much more likely to happen in lean flames than rich ones.'

What is needed is some way of understanding how the design of fuel injectors and the geometry of the combustion chamber interact to form this sort of instability, but the complexities of the fluid flows make this extremely difficult. However, Juniper's team has used some recent advances in applied mathematics to develop some software that could solve this problem.

The system, called InstaFlow, generates simulations that work in a similar way to MRI. 'We take a slice through the injector and the system tells you which bits of the injector are responsible for good mixing and instabilities,' he said. 'Then, crucially, it tells you what frequency and shape the motion will be - will the gas jet flap backwards and forwards or side to side? With that information on one injector, you can look at how it will fit into the acoustic modes - the pressure waves - in the combustion chamber.'

This, said Juniper, is a tough problem. The research team is using applied mathematics first published 10-15 years ago, which is an unusually short time for maths to be applied to practical engineering. 'Applied mathematicians tend to lose interest once the basic problem has been solved,' he said. 'The processes behind this tool had been applied to a flow behind a cylinder, which is a standard problem in applied maths, but it hadn't been applied to anything much more complex than that. I don't think anyone quite believed we would get this to work.'

Cambridge University's engineering department has close links with Rolls-Royce and the company began to sponsor the project in 2005, two years after Juniper started working on InstaFlow. 'We had a PhD student working on the maths, which was the side we really had to nail. Then I worked with another PhD student with Rolls-Royce this year, where we sat with the company's design team and worked out what it wanted to feed into this thing and what it would like to get out.'

The current version of InstaFlow accepts the outputs from Rolls-Royce's computational fluid dynamics (CFD) system. The output, which is generated in a few hours, is graphical - a slice through the injector highlighting the position and shape of instabilities. 'It's almost at the stage where you press a button and just let it run,' said Juniper.

The InstaFlow code was written in a modular form using Matlab software. Juniper's team is currently trying to speed it up by removing modules, reprogramming them in the more streamlined C++ language and plugging them back in. 'The speed is so important to the design process,' he said. 'Who wants to wait a week?'

The team is also developing plug-in modules, such as FlowTweak, which shows the effects of changing the flow profile. 'You'll have a flow profile from CFD and that gives rise to a certain instability,' explained Juniper. 'If you want to make that flow a bit quicker through the centre of the injector, you can drag a line with a couple of mouse clicks and it will recalculate to see what that does to the instability.'

The next phase of the project is to validate the data produced by InstaFlow against systems that have already been fully examined. The flow profiles in fuel injectors for jets are very similar to those encountered in papermaking equipment, and Juniper has been testing InstaFlow against the analysis from these systems. 'A Swedish papermaking firm had done full-blown CFD using Sweden's biggest cluster of PCs, which took several weeks,' he said. 'We did the same analysis on a laptop in an hour. It agreed to within five per cent.'

Juniper believes that InstaFlow could offer Rolls-Royce a significant advantage in the gas turbine industry. 'We went for a very ambitious project, applying this to something as big and complicated as a jet engine fuel injector,' he said. 'I'm surprised at how well it works, but perhaps not as surprised as many.'

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.