Srinivasan K

Understanding the occurrence of various feedback mechanisms of an under-expanded impinging supersonic jet is a crucial task in research. The presence of several jet modes is examined in this study for the flat and corrugated impinging plate geometries. The behavior of impinging plate configurations during mode switching is investigated by varying the flow state, such as the jet Mach number. The staging behavior at various jet Mach numbers is observed using acoustic spectral plots and schlieren flow visualization. To explore the presence of various types of modes during the jet impingement due to the modification of jet Mach number, ensemble averaging and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition of schlieren images are carried out. In the majority of situations, the corrugated design shows a reduction in tonal noise and overall sound pressure level. In exceptional cases, for the corrugated plates, the enhanced overall sound pressure level is caused by the existence of axisymmetric instability (A1, A2).

This paper investigates temperature measurement using acoustic pyrometry in hot zones and flames. For experiments in flameless hot zones, a Hartmann whistle is used as the acoustic source. Time of flight of sound waves in the heated path is calculated by cross-correlating the signals received by two microphones placed at pipe ends. Acoustic pyrometry is also performed for estimation of flame temperature in kerosene wick and candle flames, using a speaker as the acoustic source. Since length scales of single flames are small, leading to short times-of-flight, appropriate temperature profiling strategies for flame temperature estimation are identified. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In this work, effects of burner configurations on the natural oscillations of methane laminar diffusion flames under atmospheric pressure and normal gravity conditions have been studied experimentally. Three regimes of laminar diffusion flames, namely, steady, intermittent flickering and continuous flickering have been investigated. Burner configurations such as straight pipe, contoured nozzle and that having an orifice plate at the exit have been considered. All burners have the same area of cross section at the exit and same burner lip thickness. Flame height data has been extracted from direct flame video using MATLAB. Shadowgraph videos have been captured to analyze the plume width characteristics. Results show that, the oscillation characteristics of the orifice burner is significantly different from the other two burners; orifice burner produces a shorter flame and wider thermal plume width in the steady flame regime and the onset of the oscillation/flickering regimes for the orifice burner occurs at a higher fuel flow rate. In the natural flickering regime, the dominating frequency of flame flickering remains within a small range, 12.5 Hz to 15 Hz, for all the burners and for all fuel flow rates. The timeaveraged flame length-scale parameters, such as the maximum and the minimum flame heights, increase with respect to the fuel flow rate, however, the difference in the maximum and the minimum flame heights remains almost constant.

Hartmann discovered the resonance tube phenomenon in 1918. Although researchers have conducted extensive studies on this topic during the intervening 90 years, no single resource lists, analyzes, synthesizes and interprets the vast body of findings. This review offers a consolidated resource tracing development of the Hartmann tube from discovery to recent advances in understanding, prediction and application of the resonance tube. This review (a) serves as a literature resource for researchers from diverse areas, (b) provides a critical assessment of the state of the art, and (c) provides examples of the vast possibilities for applying this device. Controlled flow-induced resonance can produce high-amplitude dynamic pressures and acoustic emission over a range of frequencies. Studies on such acoustic generators interested researchers during the last half of the 20th century. Hartmann demonstrated the possibility of obtaining high acoustic efficiencies when a jet is aimed at the open end of a tube closed at the other end. His work led to numerous other studies-some that examined the physics and others that developed geometric variants and explored industrial applications. In the last decade there has been renewed interest in powered resonance tubes (PRT) because of their potential as active flow control actuators. This article also evaluates the success of flow-control strategies using PRTs, and attempts to identify promising PRT applications. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The investigation of the aeroacoustics of an underexpanded pipe-cavity jet is carried out experimentally. Two different aspect ratios of the cavity are tested for a wide range of nozzle pressure ratios. Both internal and externally radiated pipe-cavity acoustics are studied. Linear and higher-order spectral analyses are implemented on the unsteady cavity pressure to comprehend the nature of the cavity acoustics and nonlinear interactions of different acoustic modes of the pipe-cavity system. Results show that an increase in depth leads to an enhancement in the nonlinear interactions. Furthermore, the power spectral and overall sound pressure level analyses of pipe and pipe-cavity jet noise radiation are carried out. High-speed schlieren imaging techniques are used to understand jet dynamics. Highly unsteady motion of the jet initial shear layer is observed due to an upstream disturbance of the cavity. In addition, proper orthogonal and dynamic mode decomposition methods are used to extract the spatial and dynamic modes of the jet structure. These methods are used to segregate the cavity associated jet dynamics and screech dynamics.

It is well known that initial conditions significantly affect the flow field and the evolution characteristics of the jets. In the present study, experiments on twin pipe jets were performed to understand the effect of developing length on the twin-jet characteristics. The developing length was varied in the range of 4 < L/D < 9, and hot-wire data were acquired up to a downstream distance of 40D. Twin jets combine at farther downstream axial distance with an increase in the developing length due to delayed mixing brought about by relatively less intense vortex action. The range of the energy-containing eddies decreases, resulting in a decrease in the spread rates of the twin jet. © IMechE 2008.

The current work experimentally investigates the effect of Hartmann cavity acoustics on the atomization of droplet sprays. Initially, the experiments are conducted on a single droplet to understand its behavior in the sound field of a Hartmann whistle. The atomization studies on single droplet reveal that the existence of sound field causes the droplet to undergo large deformation and become irregular in shape. The degree of droplet deformation is quantified based on smaller circularity and larger Feret's diameter. The increase in cone angle of spray to a higher value in the presence of acoustics in comparison to its absence shows that the acoustics enhances the atomization. The stroboscopic visualization of sprays in the presence of acoustics further reveals the breakup of ligaments, large scatter as well as the formation of more number of droplets, indicating atomization enhancement.

The present experimental work highlights the influence of atomization quality on lean blow-out (LBO) limits and acoustic oscillations in a swirl stabilized burner with simplex atomizer. With decrease in the initial spray droplet diameter, the LBO limit shifts toward lower equivalence ratios. Reduction in droplet size also strongly influences the mode of LBO from diffusion flame to premixed lifted flame. Correlations have been developed for the LBO limit, involving mainly the time scales for evaporation, reaction and residence times for the fuel drops, as well as the gas flow. Delay in evaporation causes vapor accumulation before combustion and hence it influences both acoustic oscillations and LBO limit. The frequency of acoustic oscillations locks-in with the quarter wave frequency of the combustor duct for all initial droplet diameters considered. The amplitude of acoustic oscillations decreases with decrease in the initial droplet size.

In the thermal management of spacecraft, space thermal radiators play a vital role as heat sinks. A serial radiator with proven advantages in ground applications is proposed and analyzed for space applications. From the performance analysis, specific heat rejection (SHR) of serial radiator is found to be higher than parallel radiator by 80% for maximum diameter of the tube, 47% for maximum thickness of the fin, and 75% for maximum pitch of the tubes under consideration. Also, serial radiator requires four times higher pumping power than parallel radiator with geometric parameters and a maximum mass flowrate under consideration. In serial radiators, the cross conduction between the fins has a significant effect on its thermal performance. Thus, conjugate heat transfer simulations and optimization operations are to be performed iteratively to optimize the serial radiator, which is computationally costly. To reduce the computational time, artificial neural network (ANN) is trained using conjugate heat transfer simulations data and combined with the genetic algorithm (GA) to perform optimization. Taguchi's orthogonal arrays provided the partial fraction of conjugate heat transfer simulations set to train the ANN. Taguchi-Neuro-Genetic approach, a process that combines the features of three powerful techniques in different optimization phases, is used to optimize both parallel and serial radiators. The optimization aims to obtain a configuration that provides the lowest mass and lowest pumping power requirement for given heat rejection. Optimization results show that the conventional parallel radiator is about 20% heavier and requires about 35% more pumping power than the proposed serial radiator.

Mechanical vibrations introduced in diffusion flame burners significantly affect the flame characteristics. In this experimental study, the effects of axial vibrations on the characteristics of laminar diffusion flames are investigated systematically. The effect of the frequency and amplitude of the vibrations on the flame height oscillations and flame stability is brought out. The amplitude of flame height oscillations is found to increase with increase in both frequency and amplitude of burner vibrations. Vibrations are shown to enhance stability of diffusion flames. Although flame lifts-off sooner with vibrations, stability of the flame increases.