| Abstract: | Organic gel propellants are promising candidates for a variety of rocket motor and scramjet applications, since they are intrinsically safe and provide high performance. It is well known that organic gel fuel droplets exhibit distinct combustion characteristics compared with conventional liquid fuel droplets, and furthermore an understanding of the ignition delay and lifetime of these droplets is critical to the improvement of combustor design. In this work, investigations of the combustion of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) organic gel droplets in different nitrogen tetroxide (NTO) oxidizing atmospheres were conducted using two sets of experimental apparatus. The combustion characteristics under different conditions of temperature and pressure were compared and analyzed based on the flame shapes observed during experimentation. From these trials, an unsteady combustion model was developed and used for the numerical simulation of spray‐sized UDMH organic gel droplet combustion in an NTO atmosphere. The hypergolic ignition and burning characteristics of the organic gel droplets under conditions simulating either engine startup or steady state combustion were compared, and changes in ignition delay and droplet lifetime with ambient temperature and pressure were analyzed. The experimental and numerical results show that the UDMH organic gel droplets exhibit periodic swell‐burst behavior following the formation of an elastic film at the droplet surface. Each droplet burst results in fuel vapor ejection and flame distortion, the intensity of which declines with increasing ambient pressure. However, the swell‐burst period is extended with increasing ambient pressure, which results in potential flameout. Under conditions of low temperature and pressure similar to those at engine startup, the ignition delay and lifetime of spray‐sized gel droplets decrease with increasing temperature or pressure, although there is a sharp increase in droplet lifetime when the ambient pressure reaches a critical value associated with flameout. The ignition delay was found to be a rate‐limited phenomenon linked to the droplet heating rate. The proportion of ignition delay and droplet lifetime due to droplet heating‐up decreased with increasing temperature or decreasing pressure. Conversely, at high temperatures and pressures simulating the engine’s steady state operating conditions, the droplets were observed to flameout after several swell‐burst periods and both ignition delay and lifetime decreased monotonically with increasing temperature or pressure. The ignition delay time was determined to be rate‐limited by gas phase chemical reactions and contributed very little to the overall droplet lifetime compared with the engine startup condition. |
