Simulation of supercritical flows in rocket-motor engines: application to cooling channel and injection system

Abstract

To address physical modeling of supercritical multicomponent fluid flows, ideal-gas law must be changed to real-gas equation of state (EoS), thermodynamic and transport properties have to incorporate dense fluid corrections, and turbulence modeling has to be reconsidered compared to classical approaches. Real-gas thermodynamic is presently investigated with validation by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) data. Two major issues of Liquid Rocket Engines (LRE) are also presented. The first one is the supercritical fluid flow inside small cooling channels. In a context of LRE, a strong heat flux coming from the combustion chamber (locally Φ ≈ 80 MW/m2 ) may lead to very steep density gradients close to the wall. These gradients have to be thermodynamically and numerically captured to properly reproduce in the simulation the mechanism of heat transfer from the wall to the fluid. This is done with a shock-capturing weighted essentially nonoscillatory (WENO) numerical discretization scheme. The second issue is a supercritical fluid injection following experimental conditions [1] in which a trans- or supercritical nitrogen is injected into warm nitrogen. The two-dimensional results show vortex structures with high fluid density detaching from the main jet and persisting in the low-speed region with low fluid density.