A Numerical Study of H2/O2 Detonation Waves and their Interaction with Diverging/Converging Chambers

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to study the cellular structure of H2-O2 detonation waves, which entails the formation, evolution and the dynamic characteristics of the cellular structure, as well as the influences of diverging/converging chambers on the detonation structure. In this work, a detailed elementary chemical reaction model with 9 species and 19 elementary reactions is used for a stoichiometric H2-O2 mixture diluted with argon. The 3rd TVD Runge-Kutta method and WENO scheme with high resolution grids are employed to discretize the temporal and convection terms in the governing equations, respectively, while the source terms are solved by the numerical package of CHEMEQ. The influences of the 2-D diverging/converging walls on the detonation wave and its cellular structure were investigated. For further understanding of these influences, axisymmetric diverging/converging chambers were introduced. A comparison on the simulation results between the axisymmetric chambers and the two-dimensional chambers was presented.