Coupled Lagrangian impingement spray model for doublet impinging injectors under liquid rocket engine operating conditions

To predict the effect of the liquid rocket engine combustion chamber conditions on the impingement spray, the conventional uncoupled spray model for impinging injectors is extended by considering the coupling of the jet impingement process and the ambient gas field. The new coupled model consists of the plain-orifice sub-model, the jet-jet impingement sub-model and the droplet collision sub-model. The parameters of the child droplet are determined with the jet-jet impingement sub-model using correlations about the liquid jet parameters and the chamber conditions.The overall model is benchmarked under various impingement angles, jet momentum and offcenter ratios. Agreement with the published experimental data validates the ability of the model to predict the key spray characteristics, such as the mass flux and mixture ratio distributions in quiescent air. Besides, impinging sprays under changing ambient pressure and non-uniform gas flow are investigated to explore the effect of liquid rocket engine chamber conditions. First, a transient impingement spray during engine start-up phase is simulated with prescribed pressure profile. The minimum average droplet diameter is achieved when the orifices work in cavitation state, and is about 30% smaller than the steady single phase state. Second, the effect of non-uniform gas flow produces off-center impingement and the rotated spray fan by 38°. The proposed model suggests more reasonable impingement spray characteristics than the uncoupled one and can be used as the first step in the complex simulation of coupling impingement spray and combustion in liquid rocket engines.

Experiment, acoustic model for the self-oscillation of coaxial swirl injector and its influence to combustion of liquid rocket engine

During the experiment of gas/liquid coaxial swirl injector conducted with air and water under atmosphere environment, it is observed that the injector may selfoscillate. The self oscillation periodically occurs and vanishes with the increasing velocity of the gas flow.A theoretical model is presented based on the experiment investigation. Simulation of the acoustic process has been performed and conclusions consistent with the experiment can be drawn from the theoretical model, which explains the exPeriment phenomena quite well. At last, the comparison between phenomena of the self oscillation and some experiments of LRE indicates that some instability phenomena in oxygen/hydrogen propellant rocket engine may be the related to self oscillation in coaxial injectors