Verification on spray simulation of a pintle injector for liquid rocket engine

• DOI: 10.1007/s11630-016-0838-y
• Publication Date: 2016-01-07T22:45:35Z
• Authors: Min Son; Kijeong Yu; Kanmaniraja Radha...; Bongchul Shin; Jaye Koo
• Keywords: Throttle; Rocket engine; Spray characteristics; Rocket (weapon); Liquid-propellant rocket; Multiphase flow

The pintle injector used for a liquid rocket engine is a newly re-attracted injection system famous for its wide throttle ability with high efficiency. The pintle injector has many variations with complex inner structures due to its moving parts. In order to study the rotating flow near the injector tip, which was observed from the cold flow experiment using water and air, a numerical simulation was adopted and a verification of the numerical model was later conducted. For the verification process, three types of experimental data including velocity distributions of gas flows, spray angles and liquid distribution were all compared using simulated results. The numerical simulation was performed using a commercial simulation program with the Eulerian multiphase model and axisymmetric two dimensional grids. The maximum and minimum velocities of gas were within the acceptable range of agreement, however, the spray angles experienced up to 25% error when the momentum ratios were increased. The spray density distributions were quantitatively measured and had good agreement. As a result of this study, it was concluded that the simulation method was properly constructed to study specific flow characteristics of the pintle injector despite having the limitations of two dimensional and coarse grids.