A Study of Walls Thermal Conditions for a Bidirectional Vortex Combustor

Bidirectional vortex combustors are among the most efficient devices in terms of pollutants emission, fuel residence time, an extended range of stable operation. Despite many papers devoted to flow structure in the bidirectional chamber, their heat transfer and wall temperature distributions are not well-studied experimentally as well as most available calculation results are based on adiabatic or isothermal wall conditions. The present paper reports on new experimental and numerical results on flow and flame structures and surface temperature distributions obtained for a combustor with a toroidal vortex chamber. These results show a strong effect of the combustor operation mode and geometry configuration on its thermal conditions. Based on experimental validation, a reliable numerical approach for fluid dynamics, combustion, and heat transfer simulations in the bidirectional vortex chamber is suggested. This approach could assist in determining the most efficient parameters of the bidirectional combustor in terms of energy and environmental indicators as well as wall thermal conditions and service life.