Ricerc@Sapienza

In liquid rocket engines, wall heat transfer analyses are of primary importance for the thrust chamber design. Numerical investigations usually derive the convective heat flux from computational fluid dynamics simulations, whereas the radiative counterpart is often neglected. The goal of the present paper is a systematic numerical investigation on the role of radiative heat transfer on the overall thermal loads occurring in the thrust chamber of liquid rocket engines. To this purpose, a numerical code for thermal radiation computations is coupled to a computational fluid dynamics solver.

The paper is intended to present both experimental and numerical approaches for estimating the heat exchange through thermal radiation towards the walls of lab–scale paraffin–based thrust chambers. Two firing tests of a lab–scale gaseous–oxygen/paraffin–wax hybrid rocket engine have been performed to apply such methods. In particular, the radiative wall heat flux has been evaluated by both spectroscopic measurements and discrete transfer method computations. Details of such approaches are given together with results achieved.