Publications

Numerical Predictions and Experimental Results of Air Flow in a Smooth Quarter-Scale Nacelle

Black, Amalia R.; Suo-Anttila, Jill M.; Gritzo, Louis A.

Fires in aircraft engine nacelles must be rapidly suppressed to avoid loss of life and property. The design of new and retrofit suppression systems has become significantly more challenging due to the ban on production of Halon 1301 for environmental concerns. Since fire dynamics and the transport of suppressants within the nacelle are both largely determined by the available air flow, efforts to define systems using less effective suppressants greatly benefit from characterization of nacelle air flow fields. A combined experimental and computational study of nacelle air flow therefore has been initiated. Calculations have been performed using both CFD-ACE (a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model with a body-fitted coordinate grid) and WLCAN (a CFD-based fire field model with a Cartesian ''brick'' shaped grid). The flow conditions examined in this study correspond to the same Reynolds number as test data from the full-scale nacelle simulator at the 46 Test Wing. Pre-test simulations of a quarter-scale test fixture were performed using CFD-ACE and WLCAN prior to fabrication. Based on these pre-test simulations, a quarter-scale test fixture was designed and fabricated for the purpose of obtaining spatially-resolved measurements of velocity and turbulence intensity in a smooth nacelle. Post-test calculations have been performed for the conditions of the experiment and compared with experimental results obtained from the quarter-scale test fixture. In addition, several different simulations were performed to assess the sensitivity of the predictions to the grid size, to the turbulence models, and to the use of wall functions. In general, the velocity predictions show very good agreement with the data in the center of the channel but deviate near the walls. The turbulence intensity results tend to amplify the differences in velocity, although most of the trends are in agreement. In addition, there were some differences between WLCAN and CFD-ACE results in the angled wall regions due to the Cartesian grid structure used by the WLCAN code. Also, the experimental data tended t o show poorer resolution near the walls of the transition ducts. The increased uncertainty in the data highlights some of the challenges in getting data near the walls due to the low signal to noise ratio. Overall, this effort provided a benchmark case for both the WLCAN and CFD-ACE codes for the application of interest.