Coupled Heat Transfer Analysis in Regeneratively Cooled Thrust Chambers

The coupled hot-gas/wall/coolant environment that occurs in regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engines is studied by a computational procedure able to provide a quick and reliable prediction of thrust-chamber wall temperature and heat flux as well as coolant-flow characteristics, like pressure drop and temperature gain in the regenerative circuit. The coupled analysis is performed by means of a CFD solver of the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations for the hot-gas flow and by a simplified quasi-2D approach, which widely relies on semi-empirical relations, for the coolant flow and wall structure heat transfer in the cooling channels. Coupled computations of the Space Shuttle Main Engine Main Combustion Chamber are performed and compared with available literature data. Results show a reasonable agreement in terms of coolant pressure drop and temperature gain with nominal data, whereas the computed wall temperature peak is closer to hot-firing test data than to the nominal value.