SE-5 Facility Description
The SE-5 High Pressure Gaseous Burner (HPGB) Laboratory is a gas-fueled high-pressure combustion facility with optical access. The facility provides optical access to the flame zone through four ultraviolet-grade fused silica optical windows (44-mm-thick by 85-mm clear apertures located around the periphery), enabling the calibration of nonintrusive optical diagnostics to measure chemical species and temperature. The HPGB rig in SE-5 can operate at sustained pressures up to 60 atm with a variety of gaseous fuels, liquid jet fuel, and oxidizers, including carbon monoxide, methane, oxygen-argon, and pure oxygen. The specially designed microtube array burner is mounted inside the air-cooled high-temperature liner casing within the rig. The burner was designed to provide a uniform combustion product zone downstream of the flame for calibrating the laser Raman diagnostic system. The data from the HPGB rig enables the validation of numerical codes that simulate gas turbine combustors. All aspects of the facility operation, including startup, shutdown, and automatic safety shutdowns are controlled and monitored via an icon-based touch-screen software system and a programmable logic controller (PLC) in conjunction with a cost-effective four-PC server cluster.

SE-5 Special Features
The facility is unique because it is the only continuous-flow, hydrogen capable 60 ATM rig in the world with optical access. It will provide researchers with new insights into flame conditions that simulate the environment inside the ultra-high pressure-ratio combustion chambers of tomorrow's advanced aircraft engines.