One of the ongoing activities in this lab is the development of burners and injector for combustion applications. In this regard the primary motive is to understand the fundamental combustion process that drive the stability of the flames in these burners/injectors so that we will be able to develop new types of burners/injectors which
aids clean combustion
stable flame over wide operating ranges
generate numerical data base for validation.
The burner development work is primarily for fundamental research. We try to develop them as simple as possible in design (which is the most difficult task), so that we will get little little information that can be extrapolated to understand the complex processes in the real engines. In reality it is still almost impossible to simulate a candle flame stabilization in an ambient environment accurately. So, that tells us about why these fundamental works are so important.
The injector development works are mostly targeted towards throttling applications. Be it power generation or aerospace applications, atomization of the liquid fuel that satisfies the indented application is the key. Hidden behind it is the urgent need to burn the fuel clean with minimum pollutants as permitted. As combustion engineers/researchers it goes beyond saying that it is one of the/THE most important responsibility. Flame ignition and stabilization itself is painful with liquid fuels, in-addition, having the injector to have flame stabilized over a wide operating range (like for throttling applications) is more difficult. Power generation usually uses gaseous oxidizers, but in space applications its mostly liquid oxidizers, which makes the atomization process incredibly difficult.
So, are we going to solve anything at all with this work?
Probably not!
Rocket engines/gas turbines work at more than 50 bars chamber pressure. And the combustion chemistry or turbulence or turbulence- chemistry interaction is nowhere related to those at atmospheric conditions. But understanding the processes at atmospheric conditions is important in our quest to understand the high-pressure combustion processes in these engines. The reality is there doesn't even exist a chemical kinetic mechanism used in numerical simulations that can accurately predict the combustion under those conditions, even for simple fuels like H2.
In a nutshell, we are just scratching the surface. But, we have to start somewhere!!! The work done in this lab is the "tip" of that "somewhere".