Assessment of a Conjugate Heat Transfer Model for Rocket Engine Cooling Channels Fed with Supercritical Methane

Abstract

A numerical solver able to describe a rocket engine cooling channel fed with supercritical methane is validated against experimental data coming from a test article conceived and tested by the Italian Aerospace Research Center. The multi-dimensional numerical solver is based on a conjugate model for the coolant flow, modeled by the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations, and the heat transfer within the wall, modeled by the Fourier’s law of conduction. In this study a typical experimental test case is reproduced in detail in order to evaluate the influence of partially unknown parameters, as surface roughness and wall thermal conductivity, and of operative parameters uncertainty, as coolant mass flow rate and entering heat transfer rate. The comparison made with respect to the wall temperature and coolant pressure drop of the whole set of experimental data allows to discuss the reliability of the experimental data and to identify the test cases with significant heat loss.