Abstract
The staged Hybrid rocket engine (HRE) is a relatively new concept that minimizes a loss of combustion performance with an oxidizer to fuel ratio shifting, while maintaining the key advantages of HREs. Knowing that a key component of the staged HRE is the secondary combustion, in this study a reacting flow Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based tool was developed to analyze and to predict the performance of staged HRE secondary combustion. Using an equilibrium-chemistry one stream Probability density function (PDF) combustion model, the reacting flow CFD modelling has been done under eight different test conditions. After extensive validations both with non-reacting flow experimental and numerical data and with combustion experiments, this study finds that the CFD-based tool provides satisfactory predictions about the combustion efficiency of staged HRE secondary combustion. The results of both the CFD-based tool and combustion experiments showed a very similar tendency to combustion efficiency under the same test conditions, with an exception that the CFD-based tool seems to overestimate the combustion performance by 11-25 % compared to the combustion experiment. These differences are likely due to overestimation of the one-stream PDF model and oversimplification of the CFD modeling as well as measurement uncertainty in the experiments.
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Recommended by Associate Editor Jeong Park
Changjin Lee received Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Konkuk University, Korea. His research interests include rocket and jet propulsions.
Dongeun Lee received M.Sc. in aerospace engineering from Konkuk University in 2017. He is currently an Assistant Researcher in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Konkuk University, Korea. His research interests include rocket combustion and propulsion.
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Lee, D., Lee, C. Secondary combustion in a staged hybrid rocket engine. J Mech Sci Technol 31, 3067–3073 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-017-0550-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-017-0550-1