Raman Measurements of Cryogenic Injection at Supercritical Pressure

Understanding the complex environment of rocket chambers involves a good knowledge of injection phenomena and gives the designer the ability to employ time and cost saving modeling tools to design a higher performance engine. This project looked at injection processes in the supercritical regime using cryogenic nitrogen. Experimental data taken by 2-D Raman imaging allowed the comparison of density and divergence angels with computational models. These parameters provide much information about the jet development and mixing with the surrounding gas. The process used to derive divergence angles from Raman images proves difficult to compare directly with other techniques.     

Controlling the level of the sonic boom generated by a flying vehicle by means of cryogenic forcing. 2. Distributed injection of a supercooled gas from the vehicle surface

The possibility of improving the efficiency of cryogenic forcing on the parameters of the hanging shock determining the length of the region of minimization of the sonic boom (middle zone) generated by a modified power-law body is studied. The effect of distributed injection of the coolant from the body surface on the formation of a perturbed flow near the body and at large distances from the body is considered. The scheme of distributed injection and the regime of coolant exhaustion are demonstrated to exert a significant effect on the length of the middle zone of the sonic boom. A scheme of cryogenic forcing is determined, which ensures reduction of bow shock wave intensity by more than 40% at distances corresponding to 7000 body diameters. The mechanism of cryogenic forcing on the flow structure near the body is discussed. __________ Translated from Prikladnaya Mekhanika i Tekhnicheskaya Fizika, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 136–144, March–April, 2009.     

Coaxial atomization of a round liquid jet in a high speed gas stream: A phenomenological study

Coaxial injectors have proven to be advantageous for the injection, atomization and mixing of propellants in cryogenic H₂/O₂ rocket engines. Thereby, a round liquid oxygen jet is atomized by a fast, coaxial gaseous hydrogen jet. This article summarizes phenomenological studies of coaxial spray generation under a broad variation of influencing parameters including injector design, inflow, and fluid conditions. The experimental investigations, performed using spark light photography and high speed cinematography in a shadow graph setup as main diagnostic means, illuminate the most important processes leading to atomization. These are identified as turbulence in the liquid jet, surface instability, surface wave growth and droplet detachment. Numerical simulations including free surface flow phenomena are a further diagnostic tool to elucidate some atomization particulars. The results of the study are of general importance in the field of liquid atomization.     

Controlling the level of the sonic boom generated by a flying vehicle by means of cryogenic forcing. 3. Physical justification of the cryogenic action

The influence of the basic factors of cryogenic forcing on formation of the middle zone on the sonic boom and aerodynamic characteristics of the flying vehicle is studied by experimental and numerical methods. Experimental data obtained with alcohol or liquid nitrogen as an injected liquid are used for comparisons; as a result, the total effect of temperature and coolant evaporation can be determined. The influence of temperature is studied by means of numerical simulations of the cryogenic action of distributed injection of air. A comparison of numerical and experimental data reveals the effect of the coolant evaporation process on perturbed flow formation. It is demonstrated that evaporation of the coolant outgoing onto the vehicle surface should be intensified to increase the efficiency of cryogenic forcing (to decrease the coolant flow rate).     

湿式发射对同心筒瞬态热冲击的影响机理

针对路基同心筒自力发射整体热环境恶劣的问题,依托弹性变形和域动分层相结合的动网格技术,基于均质多相流理论并耦合液态水专用汽化求解程序,建立在发射筒底部注水的三维气液两相流体动力学模型;以火箭发动机自由射流注水实验为基础,验证汽化程序三维计算的可靠性与有效性;通过瞬态数值计算,讨论筒底注水角度对导弹、内外筒热环境和导弹载荷特性的影响规律。分析表明:发射筒内发生了显著的汽化反应;导弹及发射系统总体热环境得到了显著改善,实现了发射系统持续降温的目的;在筒底注水后,弹底的附加推力及火箭发动机的推力有一定增加,随着注水量的减少,注水对导弹载荷的影响越来越弱。     

水润滑高速动静压轴承试验研究

研究了动静压轴承在水介质润滑和高速、高压极端工况条件下,最小液膜厚度和流量等性能参数的变化情况,并将其与理论预测结果进行比较.结果表明,水润滑动静压轴承在高速时能够稳定运行,且形成完整的润滑液膜,没有出现明显的汽化及汽蚀现象,试验后轴承表面涂层基本完好.试验结果显示出轴承的承载能力和流量主要取决于供水压力,这与理论预测结果基本一致.     

Pore Scale and Macroscopic Displacement Mechanisms in Emulsion Flooding

The flow properties of complex fluids through porous media give rise to multiphase flow displacement mechanisms that operate at different scales, from pore-level to Darcy scale. Experiments have shown that injection of oil-in-water emulsions can be used as an effective enhanced-oil recovery (EOR) method, leading to substantial increase in the volume of oil recovered. Pore-scale flow visualization as well as core flooding results available in the literature have demonstrated that the enhanced recovery factor is regulated by the capillary number of the flow. However, the mechanisms by which additional oil is displaced during emulsion injection are still not clear. In this work, we carried out two different experiments to evaluate the effect of emulsion flooding both at pore and macro scales. Visualization of the flow through sand packed between transparent plexiglass parallel plates shows that emulsion flooding improves the pore-level displacement efficiency, leading to lower residual oil saturation. Oil recovery results during emulsion flooding in tertiary mode (after waterflooding) in parallel sandstone cores with very different absolute permeability values prove that emulsion flooding also leads to enhancement of conformance or volumetric sweep efficiency. Combined, the results presented here show that injection of emulsion offers multiscale mechanisms resulting from capillary-driven mobility control.     

用于低温风洞的新颖制冷方法

描述了用于低温风洞的新颖制冷系统,利用热交换器回收排气冷量预冷压缩空气,然后再用热分离器将其降至深低温作风洞气源．原理性实验结果证实新制冷方法的可行性．讨论了新制冷方法产生的有一定压力的低温空气作引射气源,引射驱动回流型风洞的特性．其制冷方法与现有低温风洞喷雾液氮制冷相比,由于仅需压缩空气而无需液氮,造价更便宜．更由于能量利用合理,效率高,因而运行成本可显著降低．     

Accelerometer spiking under cryogenic conditions

Spurious transient outputs of a piezoelectric accelerometer have been observed when the accelerometer is attached to a surface undergoing rapid cool-down to a cryogenic temperature. Such conditions occur in cryogenic propellant rockets on assemblies such as feedlines and turbopumps. Under exposure to liquid oxygen, surface temperatures can drop to near −300°F in a matter of minutes. The occurrence of spurious output depends on the internal construction of the accelerometer and on the effectiveness of thermal isolation provided by the mounting for a susceptible accelerometer. Specifically, an Endevco Model 2271AM20 charge-mode, compression-type accelerometer (CTA) has been observed to produce intermittent spurious output spikes during flight of a launch vehicle, during ground test firing of a rocket engine and in laboratory experiments. It is suggested that this spiking, also known as the pyroelectric effect, can be attributed to charge buildup due to thermal effects in the piezo-electric crystal stack. In the case studies, sporadic jumping of this charge across a gap at the outer edge of the plating on the crystal stack face is believed to cause momentary saturation of the charge amplifier. A replacement Endevco Model 7722 shear-type accelerometer (STA) using a different type of crystal arrangement as well as a different crystal material proved to eliminate these spurious charge jumps in a series of laboratory tests. This paper presents the results of experiments conducted to evaluate both the CTA and the STA. The effectiveness of different mounting configurations, used to provide thermal isolation sufficient to eliminate the spikes from the CTA, was evaluated. It is also suggested that observations of a particular type of nonzero mean signal in the time domain and broad, elevated, low-frequency content in the frequency spectrum can be useful in detecting the presence of pyroelectric-induced transients, even if the spikes are visually buried within high-amplitude vibration data.     

Unsteady turbulent flow of a gas suspension in a channel under conditions of injection and forced pressure oscillations

A turbulent flow of a suspension of solid particles in a gas is considered. The suspension is located in a channel with permeable walls (the pressure at the left end face of the channel follows a sinusoidal law). The flow considered here reflects the principal features of the flow in the combustion chamber of a solid-propellant rocket motor. The unsteady flow of the gas suspension is described by using the Eulerian-Lagrangian approach. A stochastic variant of the discrete-trajectory approach is used for modeling the particle motion. The influence of the condensed phase on the turbulence characteristics and acoustic oscillations of the parameters of the working medium in the channel in the case of injection is discussed. The calculated results are compared with data obtained in a physical experiment.     

超导磁力与静压液膜力复合轴承的静动特性分析

以新一代液体火箭发动机涡轮泵为应用前景,提出了一种带小孔节流的超导-液体静压复合推力轴承.该复合轴承由6块圆形超导瓦和6块带有小孔节流的圆形液体静压推力瓦构成,依靠涡轮泵系统自带的低温介质(如液氢液氧等),可以实现超导磁斥力与流体静压力的复合.基于解耦方法分析了复合轴承的静动特性,重点研究不同液膜厚度下复合轴承的承载力和刚度随节流孔径、液腔直径等的变化规律.在设计工作点附近,超导推力瓦和静压推力瓦的承载力大体相当,而后者的刚度则是前者的300倍以上.理论结果表明该复合结构既可以保证启动阶段无接触摩擦,又能在工作阶段保持较高刚度以抗冲击,对设计高可靠性火箭涡轮泵的轴系结构具有参考价值.     

Surrogate model‐based strategy for cryogenic cavitation model validation and sensitivity evaluation

The study of cavitation dynamics in cryogenic environment has critical implications for the performance and safety of liquid rocket engines, but there is no established method to estimate cavitation‐induced loads. To help develop such a computational capability, we employ a multiple‐surrogate model‐based approach to aid in the model validation and calibration process of a transport‐based, homogeneous cryogenic cavitation model. We assess the role of empirical parameters in the cavitation model and uncertainties in material properties via global sensitivity analysis coupled with multiple surrogates including polynomial response surface, radial basis neural network, kriging, and a predicted residual sum of squares‐based weighted average surrogate model. The global sensitivity analysis results indicate that the performance of cavitation model is more sensitive to the changes in model parameters than to uncertainties in material properties. Although the impact of uncertainty in temperature‐dependent vapor pressure on the predictions seems significant, uncertainty in latent heat influences only temperature field. The influence of wall heat transfer on pressure load is insignificant. We find that slower onset of vapor condensation leads to deviation of the predictions from the experiments. The recalibrated model parameters rectify the importance of evaporation source terms, resulting in significant improvements in pressure predictions. The model parameters need to be adjusted for different fluids, but for a given fluid, they help capture the essential fluid physics with different geometry and operating conditions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tangential Slot Gas Film Cooling. Comparison of Calculation and Experiment

A method of calculating of the boundary layer in liquid rocket engine (LRE) nozzles, developed by the authors and based on a differential three-parameter turbulence model, is tested using the known experimental data for the boundary layer on a plate in zero-pressure-gradient flow with tangential gas injection. Over a wide range of both bulk flow and injected gas parameters and for variable slot geometry, the calculations for both integral and local flow and heat transfer characteristics satisfactorily agree with experiment. The study has made it possible to obtain the governing parameters which significantly affect the gas film effectiveness.     

ACOUSTIC–MEAN FLOW INTERACTION AND VORTEX SHEDDING IN SOLID ROCKET MOTORS

The present work is devoted to the numerical simulation of two important phenomena in the field of solid propellant rocket motors: the first is acoustic boundary layers that develop above the burning propellant; the other is a periodic vortex-shedding phenomenon which is the result of a strong coupling between the instability of mean flow shear layers and acoustic motions in the chamber. To predict the acoustic boundary layer, computations were performed for the lower half of a rectangular chamber with bottom-side injection. The outflow pressure is sinusoidally perturbed at a given frequency. For the highest CFL numbers the implicit scheme is not able to compute the unsteadiness in the acoustic boundary layer. With very low CFL numbers or with the explicit scheme the main features of the acoustic field are captured. To simulate the vortex-shedding mechanismin a segmented solid rocket motor, the explicit version is used. This computation shows a mechanism for ‘self-excited’ vortex shedding close to the second axial mode frequency. The use of the flux-splitting technique reduces substantially the amplitude of the oscillations. A few iterations are done with flux splitting, then the computation is performed without this technique. In this case both the frequency and the intensity are well predicted. A geometry more representative of the solid rocket motor is also computed. In this case the vortex-shedding process is more complex and pairing is observed.     

Supercritical nitrogen free jet investigated by spontaneous Raman scattering

The injection of fuel and oxidizer in high pressure rocket combustion chambers is simulated in a model experiment dedicated to investigate the phenomenology of coaxial injection at supercritical pressures. Cryogenic nitrogen is injected in a pressurized reservoir of N₂ at ambient temperature at 4 Mpa and 6 Mpa, above the critical pressure for nitrogen of 3.4 Mpa. The radial density distribution of the N₂ is determined by spontaneous Raman-scattering, from the measured densities temperature distributions are derived. The radial density and temperature pro les are analyzed as a function of the distance from the injector for x/D = 1 to 30. The influence of density gradients, internal field effects and interference effects on the performance of the Raman technique when applied to turbulent high density flows is discussed. Received: 5 August 1998/Accepted: 10 January 1999     

Experimental study on the storage performance of high-vacuum-multilayer-insulation tank after sudden,catastrophic loss of insulating vacuum

High-vacuum-multilayer-insulation (HVMLI) cryogenic tank is one kind of dangerous pressure vessels. One of the worst accidents that may occur in a high-vacuum-multilayer-insulation (HVMLI) cryogenic tank is a sudden, catastrophic loss of insulating vacuum (SCLIV). The influence of SCLIV on storage performance for a HVMLI cryogenic tank is experimentally studied in this paper. A test rig was built up and experiments were conducted using LN₂ as the test medium. The cryogenic tank was tested in the conditions of various combinations with different initial liquid level and number of insulation layers. Some important conclusions for storage performance with a vacuum-lost HVMLI cryogenic tank have been obtained. The experimental results show that the numbers of insulation layers and the initial liquid level have obvious effect on the storage performance after SCLIV for cryogenic tanks.     

Experimental study of heat transfer in a HVMLI cryogenic tank after SCLIV

One of the worst accidents that may occur in a high-vacuum-multilayer-insulation (HVMLI) cryogenic tank is a sudden, catastrophic loss of insulating vacuum (SCLIV). The influence of SCLIV on the heat transfer characteristics in a HVMLI cryogenic tank has been researched experimentally in this paper. A test rig was built up and experiments were conducted using LN₂ as the test medium. Some important phenomena and heat transfer characteristics in a vacuum-lost LN₂ HVMLI cryogenic tank have been obtained. The effects of the insulation layer numbers and the initial liquid level on venting rate and heat flux leaking into the cryogenic liquid as well as the temperatures of wall and liquid have been analyzed and discussed for a LN₂ HVMLI cryogenic tank after SCLIV in this paper.     

Experimental study of jet structure and pressurisation upon liquid nitrogen injection into water

The rapid phase change and heat transfer obtained by direct contact heat exchange between a cryogen and water can generate high rates of pressurisation, which is of interest to a number of applications. A visualization study of liquid nitrogen injection into water is conducted in this work, with synchronized pressure and temperature measurement, to obtain insight into this complex phenomenon. High speed imaging reveals a four-stage evolution of liquid nitrogen jet structure upon injection into water, with a thick vapour blanket forming around a liquid nitrogen core and break-up brought on predominantly through impact with the vessel wall. Maximum pressurisation rate occurs in the third stage of injection due to a combination of heat and mass transfer. Pressurisation rates in excess of 350 bar/s are recorded and found to vary proportionally with injection pressure. The scenario of gaseous nitrogen injection is also investigated, and compared with liquid nitrogen injection. A clear advantage of liquid nitrogen injection is elucidated from the point of heat transfer and pressurisation, and implications for use in a cryogenic engine are discussed.     

Effect of air injection method on the performance of an air lift pump

Air lift pump performance was investigated experimentally for different submergence ratios (the ratio between the immersed length of the riser and its total length) using different air injection footpiece designs. For this purpose an air lift pump with a riser 200 cm long and 2.54 cm in diameter, was designed and tested. Nine different air injection footpiece designs were used at four submergence ratios with different air injection pressures (from 0.2 to 0.4 bar). An area of 10 mm² was chosen and divided into nine injection hole arrangements (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 15, 25, 34 and 48 holes) to cover the whole experimental range. Four submergence ratios were used for this work: 0.75, 0.7, 0.6 and 0.5. The experimental results showed a marked effect on the pump performance when operated with different types of injectors at different submergence ratios. The results indicated that the disk with three holes (D3) gives the highest efficiency at nearly all submergence ratios. Moreover, it is found that there is a suitable disk design for maximum water flow rate at every submergence ratio. Further, the highest efficiency resulted at the largest used submergence ratio, namely 0.75. The pump capacity and efficiency were found to be functions of air flow rate, lift ratio, and injection pressure.