New Method to Determine the Velocities of Particles on a Solid Propellant Surface in a Solid Rocket Motor

Abstract

Use of aluminized composite solid propellants and submerged nozzles are common in solid rocket motors (SRM). Due to the generation of slag, which injects into a combusted gas flow, a two-phase flow pattern is one of the main flow characteristics that need to be investigated in SRM. Validation of two-phase flow modeling in a solid rocket motor combustion chamber is the focus of this research. The particles’ boundary conditions constrain their trajectories, which affect both the two-phase flow calculations, and the evaluation of the slag accumulation. A harsh operation environment in the SRM with high temperatures and high pressure makes the measurement of the internal flow field quite difficult. The open literature includes only a few sets of experimental data that can be used to validate theoretical analyses and numerical calculations for the two-phase flow in a SRM. Therefore, mathematical models that calculate the trajectories of particles may reach different conclusions mainly because of the boundary conditions. A new method to determine the particle velocities on the solid propellant surface is developed in this study, which is based on the x-ray real-time radiography (RTR) technique, and is coupled with the two-phase flow numerical simulation. Other methods imitate the particle ejection from the propellant surface. The RTR high-speed motion analyzer measures the trajectory of the metal particles in a combustion chamber. An image processing software was developed for tracing a slug particle path with the RTR images in the combustion chamber, by which the trajectories of particles were successfully obtained.