Case study in TRIZ: design of a research combustor for pressurized operation with high wall-temperature

It appears that TRIZ has seldom been applied to the combustion field. The paper aims at showing that TRIZ can be a useful aid in overcoming difficulties that arise when developing novel combustion chambers, as usually happens in the research field. The TRIZ contradiction matrix has been employed to address the design of a laboratory combust­ion chamber that was previously developed without knowledge of TRIZ techniques. Four challenges in the develop­ment of the combustion chamber have been selected for discussion. The solutions achieved without TRIZ are pre-sented. Then, the four design challenges are formulated in view of the application of the contradiction matrix, and inventive principles are selected to solve the contradictions. In all cases the solutions suggested by the TRIZ method-ology correspond to the solutions actually adopted in the original design. However, for the case of accurate measure-ment of the inner-shell wall-temperature, TRIZ has proposed yet another solution with added advantages.