Exergetic and Thermal Performance Analysis of Liquid and Gaseous Fuel–Air Mixture in PDC Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Exergy is non-conserved quantities and associated with second law efficiency of a thermodynamic system. The exergy losses during combustion process play a vital role for pilot fuel economy. This study investigates the exergetic and thermal performance of liquid and gaseous fueled pulse detonation combustor at stoichiometric (ϕ = 1) fuel–air mixture. The mathematically formulated model and numerical simulations have been done through Ansys CFD Fluent platform to ascertain the impact of hydrogen and kerosene fuel–air mixture for exergetic performance of pulse detonation combustor. From the simulation, it is found that hydrogen–air and kerosene–air mixture has an exergetic efficiency of 53.19% and 23.43% in deflagration combustion process and 57.49% and 24.89% in detonation combustion process. The surface radiative efficiency of 23.32% is obtained from hydrogen–air detonation combustion, and it is higher than kerosene–air mixture. Exergetic efficiency of gaseous fuel–air mixture has higher compared to liquid fuel–air mixture for both deflagration and detonation combustion process. For the same fuel, utilization higher the combustion species temperature is attained from hydrogen–air mixture with zero emission.