A numerical investigation of the performance of two candidate designs for injection into supersonic flow, including a comparison of two renormalized group theory (RNG) based k-epsilon turbulence models with a more conventional k-epsilon model. The chosen designs were an unswept ramp injector with four injection ports and a novel nine-hole injector array. The objectives of the investigation were to provide reliable computational solutions to the flowfields in question using both RNG and standard k-epsilon turbulence models and to compare the solutions to experiment, thereby to judge the relative performance of the turbulence models. A second objective of the investigation was to use the computed data to provide design insights for the nine-hole injector array.

This investigation made use of GASP(tm) version 2.2, a commercial computational fluid dynamics code that was augmented by the addition of one RNG-based k-epsilon turbulence model derived by Zhou, et. al. and one variant of Zhou's model, which was derived by the author. Mesh sequencing studies were performed to measure solution quality, with the fine mesh for the injector array containing roughly one million grid nodes and the fine mesh for the ramp injector containing more than six million grid nodes. Results of these studies indicated that the injector-array solution was significantly under-resolved in the farfield, though the quality was better in the vicinity of the injector itself. The ramp-injector solution, while not perfectly grid-resolved, showed much better grid convergence in both the nearfield and farfield. Accordingly, comparison with experiment was better for the ramp injector than for the injector array. For both injectors, the differences between solutions generated with RNG-based k-epsilon and standard k-epsilon turbulence models were negligibly small."

Despite inadequate grid resolution in the farfield, the computational investigation of the nine-hole injector array did yield several important design insights. Particularly, the significance to mixing and losses of the placement of the outer injectors of the second and third rows was determined.