This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to develop a sound and novel Line Scan X-ray instrument to characterize turbulent sprays and flames inside a windowless combustor. This project will develop and evaluate a prototype system that will be used by the automotive and gas turbine industries. The goal of the project is a commercially available diagnostic technique for obtaining detailed characteristics of flames and sprays inside windowless combustors.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is that it will enable industry to measure relevant information inside combustors, permitting stricter quality control and reduced pollution emission. Significant advances in the combustion process are required to enable quantum improvements in fuel efficiency. This diagnostic tool will provide the information critically needed to enable improvements in fuel efficiency and pollution reduction.
There were two major goals for the SBIR project. The first was to evaluate a Line Scan X-Ray tomography system for characterizing flames and sprays inside windowless combustors. The second was to evaluate a multi-planar X-Ray extinction system for obtaining mass flux in two phase flows. During the project, En’Urga Inc. built and tested two prototype X-Ray systems. The first system was a tomographic system for determining the structure of flames and sprays inside windowless combustors. The second was based on using X-Ray extinction at multiple locations around a pipe so as to determine the mass flux of oil in an oil/water mixture. The first key outcome of the project is the demonstration of flame structure elucidation for the first time in a windowless combustor using X-Ray tomography. The biggest advantage of the system was that both low temperatures and high temperatures can be simultaneously measured in flames using soft X-Rays. The second key outcome of the project was the development of a prototype oil mass flux sensor for use in two-phase flows with very low oil concentrations. The prototype system could estimate the mass flux of oil at very low concentrations (less than 2% by mass) within 10%. The major scientific challenges of performing spatially and temporally resolved planar mass concentrations were successfully met during the project. The technology developed during the project will enable engineers to characterize the complex fuel injection and combustion process within engines. This is essential for the development of the next generation, high efficiency internal combustion engines. Ultimately, this will revolutionize current conventional and hybrid automotive and aerospace engines so that they offer dramatic reductions in green house gases and pollutant emissions. The development of a oil mass flux sensor for application in stripper wells will aid the production of oil in a cost effective manner for thousand of independent operators within the United States. It is anticipated that the X-Ray systems developed by En’Urga will be used to monitor processes in a wide range of industries.
