General Assembly at the CORIA Laboratories
The CORIA Research Laboratory at the INSA Rouen Normandie School of Engineering (France) hosted HESTIA’s September 2023 General Assembly meeting. It was an opportunity for the partners to visit the CORIA facilities and to discover the test rigs that will be used within HESTIA - SIRIUS and NoRIUS - under the guidance of Professor Grisch.
The SIRIUS facility will be used to test novel strut injector concepts for hydrogen-air combustion developed in cooperation between CORIA and Safran Tech under reacting conditions. The test rig features transparent UV-quartz windows that enables an optical access of the hydrogen/air flames. This enables the use of advanced laser-based diagnostics such as PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry), for measuring velocity distributions, and PLIF (Planar Laser-Induced Florescence) for measuring the location and dynamics of the flame as well as the formation of gaseous pollutants such as NO (Nitrous-Oxide).
NoRIUS is a non-reactive experimental facility designed to test the capabilities of various injector designs in their ability to promote the mixing between hydrogen and air, a key performance indicator that can be linked to the efficiency of the design and the level of harmful pollutant emissions produced. Experiments use oil droplets to seed the flow that passes through the hydrogen injection holes and a laser sheet is used to illuminate a planar section downstream from the injector. A high-speed camera is then used to measure the scattering signal produced by the droplets. An injector design that provides a better mixture of hydrogen and air results in a less intense and homogeneous measurement signal, as the density of the oil droplets is reduced. In contrast, an injector with poor mixing performance will exhibit locally very high brightness levels, indicating a mixture heterogeneity with local presences of high concentration of fuel. As these experiments are performed with inert mixtures, numerous injectors with different geometries can be rapidly manufactured in plastic by 3D printing and subsequently studied. This experimental approach not only reduces the cost of the experiments, but also facilitates the study of various injector geometries, and considerably reduces the time required to select the most suitable injectors for future combustion experiments.
The partners also discovered the HERON high-pressure optical test rig, designed as a test bed for the study of advanced aero-engine combustion chambers, using a variety of state-of-the-art laser diagnostics. This facility can operate under conditions representative of aircraft engines, with optical access to study flame structure and to measure two-dimensional distributions of velocity, pollutants (NO, CO, soot) and fuel concentrations, as well as the size and density distribution of liquid fuel droplets - all simultaneously!