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In the recent years, Airbus DS GmbH started a turbopump initiative to buildup fundamental capabilities in analyzing and designing turbomachinery within a German national funded program “TARES.” Turbomachinery is widely used in different rocket propulsion systems and include such parts as pumps and turbines. Turbines are used for generating power required by pumps in order to feed the propellants to the thrust chamber. The paper is dedicated to present an overview about currently ongoing conceptual design activities of turbomachinery covering the main design phases like TPA (TurboPump Assembly) layout tradeoff; rotational speed selection with respect to efficiency and cavitation; flow path design techniques including blade profiling; computer-aided design (CAD) work; and preliminary structural analyses. This paper presents the main outcome applying the established design logic to a liquid oxygen (LOx) turbomachinery. The component is designed based on a dedicated specification for an expander cycle type engine. This includes a LOx pump unit comprising inducer and impeller as well as a subsonic single stage reaction turbine. For the turbine drive, gaseous hydrogen (GH2) heated within the thrust chamber cooling circuit is used. Within this paper, a general overview about the preliminary work results of pump and turbine sizing, profiling, performance estimation as well as structural aspects is given.

The demand for a more comprehensive engineering tool for design and parametric investigations of thrust-chamber relevant heat transfer is pushing the improvement of coolant and hot gas side prediction tools. Regenerative Coolant Flow Simulation (RCFS) [1], Astrium in-house developed one-dimensional (1D) tool to compute hot gas and coolant side heat transfer in a coupled approach, is based on the hot gas side Cinjarew approach which has its origin in the late 1960s. This tool was used as a starting basis for the development and validation of a further improved method. Over the past years, Astrium Space Transportation (ST) has continuously expanded the knowledge in this ¦eld. In addition, subscale hot ¦rings, using di¨erent propellant combinations and injection conditions, relevant to open and closed cycle applications, were used for the second RCFS generation ¡ the RCFS-II.

As part of a German nationally funded research programme “TARES,” a turbopump initiative has been started in recent years within Airbus DS GmbH. The aim of this study is to design a liquid oxygen (LOx) turbopump assembly (LOx-TPA) for a 120-kilonewton thrust class expander cycle rocket engine. To realize this objective, Airbus DS GmbH builds on in-house heritage, notably the turbopumps of the P111 and the H20 staged combustion engines. This experience serves as input for the design of the 120-kilonewton LOx turbopump. The current paper details the fluidic design of the turbopump, including the design philosophy and the anchoring on the heritage hardware. Discussed are the pump and turbine predesign starting from the configuration trade-off, the preliminary design, the flow path and blade design, and the design of inlet/outlet and the volute. Finally, the performance (nominal and off-design) is characterized by means of three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.

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