Combustion Instability and Pressure Oscillation Numerical Simulation in a Solid Rocket Motor

Abstract

Solid Rocket Motors frequently experience unsteady gas motions and combustion instabilities. Pressure oscillations are a well-known problem of large solid rocket motors (e.g. those of the US Space Shuttle, Arianne 5 P230 and P80). Pressure oscillations lead to thrust oscillations which can generate unstable dynamic environments for the rest of the launcher up to the payload. This kind of instability is governed by the flow behavior of the combusted gas combined with pressure fluctuations and acoustic resonances within the combustion chamber. In the present investigation a computational analysis of the combusted gases passing through the chamber of such a solid rocket motor has been conducted, with particular attention to Corner and Parietal Vortex Shedding instabilities, inside the core section of the motor together with a study of the associated pressure oscillations. Nomenclature Downloaded by Mario Panelli on July 18, 2017 | http://arc.aiaa.org |

Modeling Multiphase Effects on Pressure Oscillations in Solid Propulsion

“…Even though the strongly reduced PO levels, the same behaviour has been spotted in the French demonstrating motor POD-Y [10,11], built and fired during the ongoing research on Europe next generation motor P120C. Notwithstanding the conclusions provided by the lone work [12] on multi-phase reagent flow simulation on aft-finocyl SRM do not address the presence of any thermoacoustic feedback loop as a PO source, in the current state-of-the art [13], this last is thought to have an important role in PO generation and characterization along with the well known hydrodynamic instabilities.…”

Numerical Simulation of Internal Flow Field in Solid Rocket Motor with Complex Grain

“…Javed, A. studied numerical simulation of a dual pulse solid rocket motor with solving three dimensional Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes equations, captured all the essential features of the flow field [4]. French, Ainslie D. focused on corner and parietal vortex shedding instabilities in computational analysis of the combusted gases passing through the chamber of a solid rocket motor [5]. Chen, Wei carried out the simulation of multi-burning-rate based on parameterized feature CAD 3-D grain regression model, got high accuracy results that provides a practical approach to aid SRM design of multi-burning-rate grain [6].…”