Drag Control by Hydrogen Injection in Shocked Stagnation Zone of Blunt Nose

TL;DR

This study investigates hydrogen injection as an active flow control method to reduce drag on a blunt nose during hypersonic flight, showing hydrogen's potential for effective drag reduction with lower mass flow rates compared to air.

Contribution

It introduces hydrogen injection as a novel flow control technique for hypersonic blunt noses and compares its effectiveness to air injection through numerical simulations.

Findings

Hydrogen injection achieves similar drag reduction as air with lower mass flow.

Supersonic hydrogen injection can reduce drag by up to 60%.

Hydrogen injection requires significantly less mass flow rate than air.

Abstract

The main motivation of the current study is to propose a high-pressure hydrogen injection as an hybrid active flow control technique in order to manipulate the flow-field in front of a blunt nose during hypersonic flight. Hydrogen injection can lead to self-igition under the right environment conditions in a stagnation zone, and may cause thermal heat addition through combustion and provide the counterjet effect together by pushing bow shock upstream. The axisymmetric numerical simulations for the hemispherical blunt nose are performed at a Mach 6 freestream flow with 10000 Pa pressure and 293 K temperature. The sonic and supersonic hydrogen and air injections are compared for drag reduction at the same stagnation pressure ratio $PR$ and momentum ratio ($R_{MA}$). The sonic air and hydrogen injection scenarios show similar performance in terms of drag reduction and similar SPM flow features, but hydrogen injection has a mass flow rate 3.76 times lower than air. Supersonic hydrogen injection at $M_j$ 2.94 behaves differently than supersonic air injection and can achieve up to 60 % drag reduction at lower PR and LPM mode with lower mass flow rate. Additionally, air injection achieves a drag reduction of 40 % in SPM mode at higher PR with very high mass flow rate.