A mathematical model and experimental investigation on increasing starting altitude of turbine engine

A theoretical and experimental investigation has been carried out to study the effect of oxygen addition on the altitude ignition performance of a turbine engine. The results show that the injection of oxygen can improve altitude light-up performance significantly. The starting altitude of turbine engine has been increased approximately from 4000 meters to 8000 meters. The light-up flight Mach number has been varied roughly from 0.36 to 0.8. In the theoretical phase of this investigation, the paper has calculated the flow structure of a short-annular reverse-flow combustion chamber of a turbine engine. The combustor created vortices to stabilize combustion by using three jet groups. The SIMPLE (Semi-Implicit Method for Pressures-Linked Equation)and constant viscosity turbulent model were employed to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. The paper has predicted the flow structure. The flow field of calculation shows that the reverse flow vortex at the back of the air inlet tube is more stable. Here can form a combustion zone for fuel addition. In the experimental phase of this investigation, the basic theory of increasing starting altitude has been discussed in detail. An air-borne oxygen supply ignition device (AOSID) has been developed to expand the applied range of the engine. High altitude simulating cell tests and flight tests with mother aircraft for turbine engine equipped with AOSID have also been performed successfully. Subsequently, the results of ignition tests show that AOSID is very beneficial to ignition, especially to high altitude ignition.