Model for Combustion Instability in Hybrid Rocket Engines Burning Liquefying Fuels

Abstract

Starting from the data measured in several static firings of two laboratory-scale hybrid rocket engines of different sizes burning gaseous oxygen with either a liquefying fuel or a pyrolyzing polymer, a mechanism for the combustion instability observed only with liquefying fuel is suggested. With the latter type of fuels, regression rate is increased for the formation of an unstable liquid layer on the grain surface, for which liquid fuel structures are entrained into the gas stream and burn, upon vaporization and mixing, far from the surface. Based on this circumstance, the hypothesis of a time delay to burn, with the resulting effect of triggering longitudinal acoustic modes of the system, is formulated. A simplified analytical acoustic model of a series of interconnected ducts with different cross sections and gas properties is preliminarily addressed, which allowed demonstrating the acoustic nature of the main pressure oscillation peaks measured in three firing tests along with the influence of the oxygen-feeding line on the system acoustics. Finally, by leveraging an existing acoustic model of the hybrid rocket combustion chamber including the effects of cross-sectional discontinuities and distributed fuel mass addition and combustion, the linear stability of the system is analyzed, whose results are apt to reproduce the experimental findings.