Effects of jet in crossflow on flame acceleration and deflagration to detonation transition in methane-oxygen mixture

The fluidic jet turbulator has been a novel perturbation generator in the pulse-detonation engines research field for the past few years. In this paper, an experiment is performed to study the deflagration to detonation transition (DDT) process in a detonation chamber with a reactive transverse methane-oxygen mixture jet in crossflow (JICF). The jet injection arrangement is fundamentally investigated, including single jet and various double jets patterns. Corresponding two-dimensional direct numerical simulations with a multistep chemical kinetics mechanism are employed for analyzing details in the flow field, and the interaction between the vortex and flame temporal evolution is characterized. Both the experiments and simulations demonstrate that the JICF can distinctly accelerate flame propagation and shorten the DDT time and distance. The vortex stream induced by the jet distorts and wrinkles the flame front resulting in local flame acceleration. Moreover, the double jet patterns enhance flame acceleration more than the single jet injection because of the intrinsic counter-rotating vortex pairs and enhanced turbulence intensity. (C) 2018 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.