The present work of optimization is made for specific dimensions of a rotary fuel injector used in two of the high-performance defense helicopter’s gas turbine engines, presently. The need for doing this study is to meet the thermal design requirements of limiting the combustion chamber temperatures to an optimum designed value which heavily depends on finely divided homogeneous droplet sizes, the SMD (Sauter Mean Diameter) of the fuel that is sprayed as jet of small eddies at the inlet of the primary zone. The experiment is conducted on one of fuel injectors to measure the exit mass flow and hence the discharge for a predefined time (Figure 2); it is basically a pressure-driven cold flow analysis employed to study the performance of the fuel injector under various engine operating conditions. To study the effect of the various inlet and exit pressures at various altitudes and the corresponding effects, a program is written and analyzed in MATLAB 1D solver, ICEMCFD, and FLUENT3D solver. The one-dimensional optimization algorithm includes. A steady state theoretical formulation using continuity and modified energy equation in the form of one equation flow model. This flow model additionally accounts for the relative wall roughness, the slip factor which is a direct function of the surface finish on the material of the specimen, mechanical losses that include contraction, expansion, exit, bending effects and number of holes required for fuel injection. Further, another simple idealized two-equation model is programmed that gives a crude idea of the mass flow at various rotational speeds alone. The rotational effects that are imposed during the operation of the injector are also studied by modeling the flow in two of the commercial finite element CFD [1–3] software and the approximate results of comparison are made with theoretical model and experimental [4] data for clarity of this investigation. An attempt is also made to study some of the numerical schemes expressed in the form of turbulence models that are used in the design of experiments of fluid flow, like direct numerical simulation, as applied to pipe flow studies. Keywords: CFD, SMD, Re, Y+, centrifugal, rotary fuel injectorCite this Article Manjunath IB, Kulkarni Venkatesh M, Shrutika Dargopatil. Fluid Flow Analysis and Flow Path Optimization of a Centrifugal Fuel Injector for a Turboshaft Aero Engine. Recent Trends in Fluid Mechanics. 2017; 4(1): 22–27p.
