Numerical Study of Erosive Burning in Multidimensional Solid Propellant Modeling

Abstract

Using numerical simulations, the combustion response of heterogeneous solid propellants to an imposed crossflow velocity field are examined. It is shown that this model flow is useful to capture the influence of shear flow in the so-called erosive burning phenomenon observed in actual experiments. Previous numerical studies on a model quarter-plane problem and on homogeneous solid propellants have shown that the presence of shear in the crossflow plays a role in increasing the heat transfer to the propellant surface, thus enhancing the burn rate. In the current work, the response of twoand three-dimensional packs to an imposed velocity field are first examined for different propellant morphologies and at different pressures. The imposed velocity field has its root in a separate nonreactive multiscale analysis. It is shown that, with the model flow, the variations of the erosive burning rate with shear parameters are captured, the trends being in line with experimental results. Furthermore, a comparison with experimental results present in the literature is examined, where it is shown that the results compare qualitatively well with the experiments using the estimated shear rates from the experiment. These results suggest that the influence of the shear flow on the primary diffusion flame may be a leading factor in the erosive burning effect.