The Taylor-Culick profile with arbitrary headwall injection

Abstract

Taylor’s incompressible and rotational profile is extended to a porous cylinder with arbitrary headwall injection. This profile, often referred to as Culick’s mean flow, is now generalized to permit the imposition of reactive headwall conditions. Starting with Euler’s steady equations, the solution that we derive is approximate, being exact only at the sidewall, the centerline, or for similarity-conforming inlet profiles. Furthermore, the approximation is quasiviscous, being observant of the no slip requirement at the sidewall. Based on numerical experiments under inviscid flow conditions, the closed-form approximation that we obtain appears to be well suited to describe the bulk flow field in basic models of solid and hybrid rockets where uniform sidewall injection is imposed at the propellant surface. For similarity-nonconforming profiles, the approximation becomes more accurate as we move away from the headwall. Results are verified using computational fluid dynamics for several headwall injection patterns.