Experimental and Numerical Investigation of CH$$_4$$/O$$_2$$ Rocket Combustors

Abstract

The experimental investigation of sub-scale rocket engines gives significant information about the combustion dynamics and wall heat transfer phenomena occurring in full-scale hardware. At the same time, the performed experiments serve as validation test cases for numerical CFD models and for that reason it is vital to obtain accurate experimental data. In the present work, an inverse method is developed able to accurately predict the axial and circumferential heat flux distribution in CH$$_4$$/O$$_2$$ rocket combustors. The obtained profiles are used to deduce information about the injector-injector and injector-flame interactions. Using a 3D CFD simulation of the combustion and heat transfer within a multi-element thrust chamber, the physical phenomena behind the measured heat flux profiles can be inferred. A very good qualitative and quantitative agreement between the experimental measurements and the numerical simulations is achieved.

Coaxial-Injector Surrogate Modeling Based on Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes Simulations Using Deep Learning

“…Nevertheless, LES is still a high computational cost methodology, with long computational times, which can limit its use in the context of concrete applications. An alternative, when only stationary operating conditions are of interest, is to use Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations [6][7][8][9][10]. However, even restitution times of RANS are too high if used in an optimisation framework loop of a whole engine.…”