There has been widespread interest in air-breathing supersonic combustion and its applications in scramjets. Due to the complexity of the engine and the high cost of experimental investigations, numerical investigations have been adopted by many researchers and, once validated
by the measured results, they can be used to capture the salient features of the combustion phenomenon and flows within the scramjet. This paper aims at using the commercial software, FLUENT, to investigate the
thermodynamic properties in the HyShot II combustor. To assess the effect
of different turbulence models in the supersonic hydrogen-air combustion
process, three turbulence models, namely, the Spalart-Allmaras (SA) model,
the Realizable k- model (RKE), and the Shear Stress Transport turbulence
model (SST-kω) have been implemented. The evaluation of chemical reaction mechanisms is done by considering both the single-step and the multi-step reaction mechanisms. It is found that the SST-kω model shows best results and significant difference in pressure and temperature is observed between the results obtained using the single-step and the 19-step
reaction mechanisms.