Liquid Fuel Film Cooling: A CFD Analysis With Hydrocarbon Fuel

Abstract

Cooling of liquid rocket engine combustion chambers and nozzles is a critical component to liquid rocket engine design. A common method of cooling is liquid fuel lm cooling. Liquid fuel is injected along the surface of the wall to act as a barrier against the core combustion gases. A numerical model is developed for simulating liquid fuel lm cooling in a rocket engine using a hydrocarbon fuel. The model incorporates turbulent multiphase flow with species transport within the commercial ANSYSR Fluent CFD software. Conjugate heat transfer is simulated through walls containing embedded cooling channels. A novel User Defined Function is written to incorporate heterogeneous chemical reactions between the liquid fuel and the freestream gases. Comparisons are made between simulations with and without the heterogeneous reactions as well as with simplifications to the cooling channel geometry. It is found that simplifications to the cooling geometry can artificially reduce cooling performance while neglecting the heterogeneous reactions can artificially increase cooling performance.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 24, 2016
Accession Number
AD1054144

Entities

People

  • Jacob D. Bills

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerodynamic Characteristics
  • Air Force
  • Boundary Layer
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Combustion
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Flow Visualization
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Heat Transfer
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Rocket Engines
  • Specific Heat
  • Three Dimensional
  • Turbines
  • Turbulent Mixing
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Combustion science or combustion engineering.
  • Petroleum Engineering
  • Thermal Physics or Thermal Science.