In Brief
- A $4.25 million grant from DARPA will fund research on fuel injectors.
- The work could be used to design better advanced aircraft and defense technology.
- The research will help further investigate how liquid fuel breaks into droplets.
Scientists have been tackling the challenge of atomization for centuries, primarily because liquid breakup involves several different principles of physics that are difficult to capture with simple equations.
Now, a multi-institutional team led by James Friend plans to continue that challenge with a five-year $4.25 million grant from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Friend is the Stephen F. & Camilla T. Brauer Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
With the funding, Friend, along with collaborators from the University of California, San Diego, the University of Central Florida and the University of Florida, plans to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and physics-based simulation to help design better fuel injectors for advanced aircraft and for intricately designed engines used in defense industries.
Their research will further study the elusive question of how liquid fuel breaks into droplets.
“Droplet formation affects how well fuel mixes and burns,” Friend said. “This is especially important for high-speed and hypersonic flight, where engines are much harder to design. Our goal is to find simple design rules that engineers can use.”
The research falls under DARPA’s Automated Discovery for Design and Control of Turbulent Systems (AutoDIDACTS), which is looking to demonstrate and validate new data-informed paradigms to explore and optimize designs for various aeronautics and turbulent-control problems related to the Department of War.
The team’s research addresses this goal by using a small-scale lab platform to study droplet breakup, thin-film atomizer tests, thicker-film atomizer tests with airflow, and validation in a detonation tube. They also will use AI tools to find patterns in the results, then use those patterns to create design maps for fuel injectors.
“These results will help engineers to design fuel injectors faster as well as improve combustion stability and support detonation-based and hypersonic propulsion,” Friend said. “We want to turn fuel-injector design from a lot of trial and error into a more scientific, reliable process.”
The work builds on another collaboration in Friend’s lab that is designing an ultrasound atomization nozzle. That project, PLIANT, seeks to create a device that would produce sub-10 micrometer droplets. Droplets of this size would evaporate more quickly, mix better with air and improve engine efficiency.
