Performance tests of a turbopump for the developing 7-tonf liquid rocket engine were conducted. The performance of turbopump components and their power matching were measured and examined firstly under the LN2 and water environment.. In the real propellant(LOX and kerosene) environment tests, design and off-design performances of turbopump were fully verified. During the off-design tests, turbopump running time was set the same as engine operating time and pump inlet pressure were set lower than nominal operating value in order to investigate pump suction capability. It have been verified that subject turbopump satisfies required performance -flow rate, head, suction performance and operational time -in the operating regime of developing liquid rocket engine.

A series of water tests of a fuel pump for liquid rocket engines are performed at a room temperature. According to the test results, the head coefficient of the pump follows the conventional similarity rule-unlike this, the pump shows better efficiency with higher rotational speed. Also, it is found that the pressure at the rear bearing outlet is higher than expected because the inlet of bypass pipe line is narrow. Furthermore, the cavitation performance of the fuel pump is found to be sufficient for the engine operation and is better at the lower flow ratio and higher rotational speed.

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Rolling contact ball bearings are utilized almost exclusively for liquid propellant rocket engine turbopump. Turbopump ball bearings are required to endure high speed and high load for a poor lubricated condition in cryogenic environment. To evaluate bearing heat generation performance, friction torque is investigated as a function of rotation speed, bearing load and cooling flow rate through an experimental study using water coolants. Radial and axial loads are simultaneously applied to the test bearing by gas pressurized cylinder rod. Endurance performance of bearing has been also verified under the bearing required load for operating condition during total accumulated test time 2,100 sec.

Critical speed of high thrust liquid rocket engine turbopump is obtained through a rotordynamic analysis and a unloaded turbopump test is peformed for validation of the numerical model. The first critical speed predicted by the numerical analysis is correlated well with the test result for the bearing unloaded rotor condition only considering mass unbalance load. Using the previous rotordynamic model, critical speed variation is estimated as a function of varied bearing stiffness due to pump and turbine radial loads with relative angle difference. From the numerical analysis, it is found that the relative angle difference of pump and turbine radial loads greatly affects the critical speed. However, additional axial load reduces the effect derived from the relative angle difference of radial loads.