Dynamical behaviors of aluminum droplets impinging on horizontal and inclined surfaces

Abstract

Aluminum (Al) droplets collide with the wall of the combustion chamber in a solid rocket motor at different angles of incidence and velocities, which exhibit rebounding, splashing, and other behaviors. It increases the loss of two-phase flow to degrade the performance of the engine and poses a challenge to the thermal protection system. In this study, an experimental system in which molten Al droplets impact the walls of the chamber is designed. The size of the Al droplets produced by the generator ranged from 120 μm to 2000 μm while their speeds of impact ranged from 0.85 m/s to 9 m/s. This was used to examine the process of impact of Al droplets on flat and inclined walls. The residence time and spreading diameter of the droplets were quantified to reveal their mechanism of collision. Their empirical correlations were obtained by regressing the experimental data, and the predictive error of the model was within 20% of the experimental values. Furthermore, a theoretical model was developed to analyze energy distribution during the collision between the droplets and the wall. It showed that the effect of viscous dissipation energy on droplet flow was negligibly small, but the adhesion energy of the droplet increased significantly with its initial energy. In addition, the dimensionless sliding distance was S≈8 when the tangential Weber number was greater than 90, where this was related to the high surface tension of the Al droplets. The results here provide a theoretical basis for the design of thermal protection system of solid rocket motors.