The problem
Hydrogen burns hot, fast, and lean — attractive for clean combustion, demanding on hardware. The project's focus is sustainable combustion through micromixing: distributing fuel injection across many small jets to get stable, well-mixed hydrogen combustion inside a compact liner without melting it, using analysis-driven design rather than trial and error.
Analysis campaign
I built a CFD and FEA workflow around the combustor. Species-transport simulations map hydrogen mole fraction through the injector array to evaluate mixing quality and recirculation zones. Turbulent kinetic energy fields characterize the shear layers coming off each injector tube, which drive flame anchoring. Combustor-exit temperature contours — peaking above 2,100 K locally — size the dilution scheme and set liner material limits, and pressure-field results validate the loss budget across the flame tube.
The fuel delivery side gets the same treatment: manifold simulations resolve pressure and temperature distribution across the ring-and-stem injector network to verify uniform feed to every injection point. On the structural side, thermal-stress FEA of the 304 stainless liner closes the loop between gas-side temperatures and mechanical margin.
Hardware
The analysis feeds a working demonstrator: a 304 SS combustion liner and a custom ignition circuit, packaged into a turbofan architecture with the combustor at its core. The goal is a test-ready hydrogen engine that undergraduates designed, analyzed, and built end to end.
