The Effect of Swirl Number on Lean Blow Out Limits of Lean Direct Injection Combustors

This is the first study where a single variable sweep of SN is conducted to assess its impact on lean blowout limits (LBO) in a liquid-fueled lean direct injection (LDI) combustor. This study uses a scaled NASA SV-LDI (Swirl Venturi—Lean Direct Injection) hardware and is concerned with the impact of swirl number on the lean blow-out limit of a single-element LDI system at atmospheric pressure. The swirl numbers (SN) were varied from 0.31 to 0.66 using continuously variable active swirl number control system that was developed in-house. It is shown that the minimum operating equivalence ratio is a linearly increasing function of swirl number. While previous literature agrees with the positive slope for this correlation, past work has suggested that the LBO limit is proportional to the swirler vane angle which is shown to be untrue for LDI systems. By actively varying the swirl number, it is proven that LBO is proportional to SN, and it is well known that SN is not proportional to swirler vane angle. Increased SN reduces LBO margin because the better-mixed, high swirl dilutes locally rich pockets of fuel–air mixture in a globally lean flow. In addition to a baseline venturi, which was scaled from NASA's geometry, two other venturis were tested. A low-pressure loss venturi with a large throat diameter showed poor blow-out performance whereas a parabolically profiled venturi improved LBO over the baseline for the same swirl number.