Experimental Study on Emission Performance of an LPP/TVC

A key issue in the commercial aircraft engine design is environmental acceptability, and designers are continually challenged to reduce emissions. In this paper, an experimental investigation is performed to evaluate the emission performance of a liquid-fueled trapped vortex combustor (TVC) under lean premixed prevaporized (LPP) mode. When operating as an LPP system, a TVC is fueled both in the cavities and in the main stream. The correlations between the emission performance and the total excess air ratio, the positions (4 positions) of the fuel injectors in the main stream, and the inlet temperature are obtained. Experimental results show that both the volume concentrations of unburnt hydrocarbon (UHC) and NOx (NO, NO2 usually grouped together as NOx) increase with the increase of total excess air ratio from 1.5 to 3.0; the emission performance relies heavily on the position of the main stream injector, and the best performance is achieved at Position 4 in the experiments; the increase of the inlet temperature impacts on the emission performance positively; the smallest volume concentrations of UHC and NOx obtained in the experiment are 94×10−6 and 2.3×10−6 respectively. This paper validates the feasibility of low emissions for an LPP/TVC and provides a reference for further optimization of TVCs.