Micromachined silicon fuel atomizers for gas turbine engines

This paper 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 (RIE). The atomizers are fabricated as an array, according to a designed experiment, and the influence of the geometric features on the performance of the atomizers is studied. The atomizer design is optimized by a response surface methodology. Finally, a comparative study is done, comparing and contrasting the performance of the silicon atomizers with conventional and metallic atomizers.