The a-priori prediction of high frequency combustion instability will certainly favorably impact on the development costs of new liquid propellant rocket engines. Achieving such objective with a low order model implies a significant reduction of the experimental efforts and costs, as well as those of the massive high-fidelity numerical simulations, which are mandatory in order to investigate this problem.
An hybrid in-house 1D-3D Eulerian solver for multispecies flow is being developed to face the high-frequency instability problems. Such solver employs a one-dimensional description of the injectors flow field and a multi-D representation of the combustion chamber, so that the typical multi-dimensional propagation events of transverse instability can be reproduced. Its main purpose is to reproduce the driving effects that the injection system can have on the combustion chamber. Such coupling model has been developed and already successfully tested on a longitudinal instability test-case by means of a one-dimensional Eulerian solver.
The main goal of the proposed research is to achieve the capability to predict the coupling effects occurring between the injection dynamics, yielding to an oscillating heat release rate, and the chamber pressure oscillations characterizing the transverse combustion instability.
Nowadays, high-frequency combustion instability is not predictable. Several examples are available in literature in which large CFD simulations struggle to predict its intensity or even occurrence, as explained in the previous sections. In this sense, developing any predictive tool will assure a step forward with respect to the current state of the art. Moreover, the proposer is looking for a tool which has to be as simple and convenient as possible, and capable of giving a rapid evaluation (even approximated) on the acoustic stability features of a system. Instability is unfortunately usually detected at the moment of the full-scale tests, yielding both to severe delays and to the addition of extra costs to the project schedule. When such scenario occurs, the only feasible solution is to modify the engine by adding some baffle or damping device, even if this reduces the performances of the engine significantly. Achieving the above explained predictive capability by means of a fast and cheap tool of the described kind will be an important scientific result for two main reasons. The former is that the combustion instability a-priori prediction is something not yet realized, to my knowledge.
The latter is that the proposed research will provide a useful tool to determine the stability features of a new engine within the design schedule.
In order to comply with the number of words the references are split between this section and the following
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