Modeling and Analysis of Film Cooling in Oxygen-Kerosene Rocket Thrust Chambers

Modern high performance liquid rocket engines are characterized by elevated hot gas temperatures and combustion chamber pressures leading to high wall heat fluxes, which must be correctly predicted and managed to guarantee safe operation. In these severe operating conditions, active cooling systems such as regenerative cooling might not be enough to counteract such high thermal loads. In such cases, cooling capabilities can be enhanced with the addition of a further cooling strategy, such as film cooling. The prediction of wall heat flux in such thrust chambers is of paramount importance during the design phase both for sizing and safety purposes. Despite the complexity of the phenomenon, computational fluid dynamics simulations represent a valuable solution in the convective wall heat flux prediction with respect to more expensive procedures such as hot-firing tests. In any case, the presence of experimental data is necessary in order to validate and evaluate the predictive capacity of a numerical model. In this framework, this paper aims at investigating different operating conditions of the single injector thrust chamber burning gaseous oxygen and kerosene of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) test case with and without the injection of film cooling in order to validate an in-house Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver.