Bipropellant combustion in a liquid rocket combustion chamber

Abstract

A comprehensive computer simulation code is developed for the combustion-flow analysis of a bipropellant liquid rocket engine combustor. A bipropellant group combustion model is built in the computer code to facilitate the determination of various combustion modes, including the combustion of oxidizer droplets, fuel droplets and gas mixture. Several physical submodels are also adopted to account for the interaction between bipropellant droplets and the gas-phase flow. An axisymmetric cylindrical liquid rocket engine combustion chamber installed with two annular-ring injectors is selected to demonstrate the capabilities of the present computer simulation code. Two types of injection processes are analyzed. One is characterized by a non-premixed spray process and the other is a premixed spray process. Selected numerical computations show that the premixed spray results in a better utilization of combustion chamber space and gives a higher combustion efficiency in general. But finer-droplet sprays do not necessarily lead to a higher combustion efficiency as traditionally speculated.