Evaluation of Impinging Stream Vortex Chamber Concepts for Liquid Rocket Engine Applications

Abstract

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the U. S. Army are jointly investigating vortex chamber concepts for cryogenic oxygedhydrocarbon fuel rocket engine applications. One concept, the Impinging Stream Vortex Chamber Concept (ISVC), has been tested with gel propellants at AMCOM at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. A version of this concept for the liquid oxygen (LOX)/hydrocarbon fuel (RP-1) propellant system is derived from the one for the gel propellant. An unlike impinging injector is employed to deliver the propellants to the chamber. MSFC has also designed two alternative injection schemes, called the chasing injectors, associated with this vortex chamber concept. In these injection techniques, both propellant jets and their impingement point are in the same chamber cross-sectional plane. One injector has a similar orifice size with the original unlike impinging injector. The second chasing injector has small injection orifices. The team has achieved their objectives of demonstrating the self-cooled chamber wall benefits of ISVC and of providing the test data for validating computational fluids dynamics (CFD) models. These models, in turn, will be used to design the optimum vortex chambers in the future.Measurements of thrust, pressure, and temperature at several locations on the chamber wall are conducted during hot-fire tests.' For the current chamber configuration, test results show that for the original unlike impinging injector, the chamber wall is relatively cool while the

Designing and Fabricating a Vortex Aerospike Rocket Engine

“…This has the advantage of not needing to use cooling channels or extra plumbing, thus reducing weight, cost, and complexity. Vortex engines have been designed to work so effectively that some prototypes have kept the temperature at the wall so low that some could be built using plexiglass as chamber walls (Trinh et al, 2003). However, the drawback to this design is that cooling is still needed on the nozzle, and the angle at which the oxidizer is injected must be accurately designed.…”

“…The study shows that vortex engines are possible and can produce a reasonable amount of thrust. This report was cited and used as the base for a 2003 Army Missle Comand paper exploring two methods of injecting the fuel and oxidizer (Trinh et al, 2003). Trinh et al found that injecting the oxidizer tangentially to the chamber "does not require any traditional cooling methods, such as cooling wall channels wall and/or film cooling techniques", as this method "keep[s] a high-density fluid, and therefore, relatively cooler flows, in the near chamber wall" (2003).…”