Development of CFD model for simulating gas/liquid injectors in rocket engine design

Abstract

The understanding and predictions of spray combustion characteristics are essential to the design of liquid and hybrid rocket engines. Flow distributions, such as local mixture ratio and state of the propellants and combustion products, near the injector face have a profound effect on both the performance and the hardware integrity of the rocket engine. In order to provide a simple and practical spray combustion analysis, several submodels were developed and incorporated into a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. These submodels include a real-fluid property module which is employed to account for the effect of the phase change, a pressure-correction model for the real-fluid flow, and combustion kinetics/equilibrium chemistry models. Several gas/gas and gas/liquid injector flows were simulated to demonstrate the capability and validity of the proposed CFD spray combustion model.