Supersonic film cooling using fuel on board is an effective way to simultaneously shield the huge heat and momentum flux transported from the mainstream to the wall in a scramjet engine. The self-ignition and combustion of the injected fuel film will significantly change the turbulent transport behavior in the boundary layer. To reveal the effects of the boundary layer combustion on the near-wall turbulence and wall fluxes, large eddy simulations (LES) of the Burrows–Kurkov supersonic combustion experiment using hydrogen as a film are performed based on the in-house solver scramjetFoam. The solver successfully captures the additional skin friction reduction phenomenon induced by the boundary layer combustion compared to other numerical works using LES in the public literature. The results reveal that further increased anisotropy of turbulence combined with the low-density region contributes to a remarkable suppression of turbulent transport processes in the wall-normal direction. The self-ignition point of the hydrogen film is found to oscillate back and forth in a span of 80 mm, which significantly enhances turbulence in the boundary layer. However, the increased turbulent fluctuating velocity is mainly concentrated in the streamwise direction, while the other two components are suppressed instead. The findings are also essential for improving engineering computations based on the Reynolds averaged simulation method.
The types and the characteristics of the waste heat on hypersonic vehicles and the application feasibility of thermoelectric generators (TEGs) for hypersonic aircraft are discussed in this paper. Two thermoelectric generator schemes with an isothermal heat source and a variable temperature heat source were proposed, and the corresponding models were developed to predict the performance of the waste heat recovery systems on a hypersonic vehicle with different heat sources. The thermoelectric efficiency variation with electric current, the temperature distribution of fuel and junctions, and the distribution of the thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT value) are described by diagrams. Besides, some improvements for a better performance are analyzed. The results indicate that the maximum values of thermoelectric efficiency are 5% and 2.5% for the isothermal heat source and the variable temperature heat source, respectively, and the thermoelectric efficiency improves with the temperature of the hot junction. The performance of the TEGs with variable temperature heat source is worse than that of the other TEGs under the same highest hot junction temperature conditions, and the former has a better conversion efficiency than the latter when the average temperatures are identical.