Comparison of Reactive Flow Simulations for a LOX/CH4 Multi-element Rocket Engine

Ainslie D French,Marco Marini,Pasquale Natale,Luigi Cutrone,Francesco Battista,Antonio Schettino,S Pantelakis,C Charitidis

doi:10.1051/matecconf/201930407007

Ainslie D French, Marco Marini + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201930407007

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Abstract

This study details the reactive flow simulations of a LOX/CH4 Multi-element rocket engine. The work has been conducted within the framework of the HYPROB-BREAD project whose main objective is the design, manufacture and testing of a LOX/LCH4 regeneratively cooled ground demonstrator. Numerical simulations have been carried out with both commercial software and CIRA software developed in house. Two sets of boundary conditions, nominal and experimental, have been applied from which a code-to-code validation has been effected with the former and a code-to-experiment validation with the latter. The results presented include both flow data and heat fluxes as well as parameters associated with engine performance, and indicate an excellent agreement with experimental data of a LOX/CH4 Multi-element rocket engine.

Highlights

Turbulent combustion is an extremely complicated physical process to model
The grid consisted of about 3.5 million cells and was interpreted as an unstructured grid for the ANSYSFLUENT calculation, and was converted into a fine and coarse 3D multiblock grids having 766 blocks and 3.5 and 1.75 million cells, respectively, for the calculation, see Figure 3
For the ANSYS-FLUENTcalculations the compressible 3D Navier-Stokes equations were solved with the pressure based solver using a coupled scheme

Summary

Introduction

Turbulent combustion is an extremely complicated physical process to model. Analytical techniques are inadequate for modelling such complex processes. A plethora of commercial codes have been developed which are potentially suitable to model such problems. In this paper ANSYS-FLUENT® version 14.5 [1] and are used to model the turbulent compressible reacting flow field within the HYPROB-BREAD LOX/CH4 multi-element rocket, the details of which are described in [2]. This rocket engine utilizes a regeneratively cooled thrust chamber for ground testing at 30 KN thrust. A counter-flow architecture is used for the chamber nozzle (2) cooling system, as shown in Figure 1, where the methane, serving as coolant, is injected into the fuel inlet (1) and collected in the manifold which distributes the methane through cooling channels in the cooling jacket in the counter-flow direction relative to the combustion gases, see Figure 2

Domain and Grid Parameters

Solver and Boundary Conditions

Nominal DEMO test case

Findings

Concluding Remarks