Investigation of hydrocarbon fuel rotating flow considering the variation of physical properties

Energy management on hypersonic aircraft involves in power, energy, thermal, integration, and controls research. Power generation serves as an important part for developing long endurance and reusable hypersonic aircraft. In order to utilize air turbine on hypersonic aircraft, fuel cooling scheme is established and investigated with a single cooling channel. Fitting polynomial formulas are used to calculate density, specific heat capacity, dynamic viscosity and thermal conductivity of fuel. Shear-Stress-Transport turbulence model is used in computational fluid dynamics simulation. Results show that rotating flow presents obvious compressibility due to large pressure span. The pressure distribution at the same radial position is uniform. With heating, the inlet static pressure is smaller than the outlet static pressure as the density decreases with temperature increase. With the same mass flow rate, the total pressure loss with heating is smaller than the total pressure loss without heating as the centrifugal force can put in positive work to fuel due to the density difference between centrifugal and centripetal channels. With the decrease of mass flow rate, the inlet total pressure decreases, and the outlet total pressure increases. Finally, the inlet total pressure is smaller than the outlet total pressure.