This article presents results on fabrication and testing of micromachi
ned fuel atomizers for gas turbine engines. Pressure-swirl (simplex) a
tomizers are batch fabricated by bulk micromachining of silicon using
deep reactive ion etching The atomizers are fabricated as an array, ac
cording 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 call improve the sp
ray performance relative to conventional atomizers.