Experimental and numerical investigation of regenerative cooling with subcooled nucleate boiling in liquid rocket engines

Date

2023-7-12

Author

Göçmen, Mahmut Murat.

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Ever since the development of liquid rocket engines (LRE), there has been a need to cool the engine, i.e. combustion chamber and nozzle wall, to prevent thermal failure. The most common approach for this is regenerative cooling, where one or both of the propellants flow as coolants inside the passages of the engine walls before entering the injector. In this study, a complete tool set has been developed that enables design and simulation of regenerative cooling phenomenon during the design of an LRE. The developed set consists of three tools, a one-dimensional (1D) design tool, a two-dimensional (2D) heat conduction solver, and a three-dimensional (3D) two phase flow solver based on the free and open source computational fluid dynamics software, OpenFOAM. The 1D design tool is simple and fast, and uses thermal circuit modeling to investigate the effect of geometrical parameters on the cooling channel design. The 2D tool simulates heat conduction in the solid walls of the engine to predict wall temperatures using the finite difference technique. It also enables the use of nucleate boiling by locating the subcooled nucleate boiling onset point and using appropriate heat transfer rates. The 3D simulation tool is capable of solving two-phase nucleate boiling and conjugate heat transfer in real cooling channel geometries. In order to create an accurate and computationally efficient 3D solver, different phase change models and model parameters have been investigated and their optimal combination of them for regenerative cooling channel simulations is selected. In addition, the developed computational tool set is validated through experiments on a straight cooling channel by using a test setup designed, manufactured and used as a part of this work.

Subject Keywords

Liquid Rocket Engine, Regenerative Cooling, Subcooled Nucleate Boiling

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104833

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis