Micromachined Silicon Fuel Atomizers for Gas Turbine Engines

This article presents results on fabrication and testing of micromachined fuel atomizers for gas turbine engines. Pressure-swirl (simplex) atomizers are batch fabricated by bulk micromachining of silicon using deep reactive ion etching. The atomizers are fabricated as an array, according to a designed experiment, and a study of the influence of the geometric features on the performance of the atomizers identifies the dominant geometric parameters The precision of the fabrication allows the atomizer design to be optimized by a response surface methodology. A comparative study reveals that microfabrication can improve the spray performance relative to conventional atomizers.