Structure And Cooling Design Of Liquid Rocket Engine Thrust Chamber

Increasing space flights require design of liquid rocket engine with low cost andshort duration. In order to meet such demand and also help designers work moreefficiently, an integrated design platform for liquid rocket thrust chamber is developedbased on the MFC program of Visual C++. This platform will serve as guidance fordesigners to complete the thrust chamber design step by step.“Thrust chamber structure and cooling system” is one of the important modules ofthe aforementioned design platform. This module will utilize the output informationfrom “chamber configuration design” module such as burnt gas temperature, speciescomposition etc as well as thrust chamber size as input data to design the thrust chamberstructure and cooling system. The user can select the cooling method and types ofstructure of the chamber wall, and then specify the desired settings. After an interactivecomputation, wall temperature and mechanical strength are obtained. If the criticalparameters satisfy the design objectives, a successful design is completed. Using thedata from design, an exquisite3D model of the designed thrust chamber can be built bythe Pro/E software.Through this thesis work, an extensive literature review has been conducted.Available theories and methods for design of structure and cooling system have beensummarized and investigated, particularly to the liquid rocket engine. Proper theoriesand design methods are selected and an integrated program of design is developed withthe data and design procedure for actual rocket engine in published literature. Differentthrust chambers require compatible cooling technique. In general, regenerative cooling,film cooling, ablative cooling and radiative cooling can be chosen in the design module.The regenerative cooling, which can be applied together with the other three methods, isthe most complicated. The regenerative channels have three structure configurations:milling grooves, corrugated plates and bundle tubes. During the design process, detaileddimensions and types of material can be chosen. The design program will involve thecomputations of both heat transfer and mechanical strength for the entire chamber andresults can be displayed in a user-friendly mode.This thesis reproduces the design of three typical rocket engines worldwide frompublished literature: the main engine of USA space shuttle, the first stage engine of China’s CZ-2C rocket and a small rocket engine named R-4D. The results from the“chamber configuration design” show few differences compared with the actualdimension and capability parameters. The cooling and structure design results show afavorable performance. The applications validate practicability and availability of theintegrated platform.This thesis also studies the effects of cooling fluid flux, type of structure, materialof wall and chamber pressure on the cooling system design. Several engine chambersare designed for the same thrust value at different chamber pressures, film and radiativecooling computation process is carried out for each chamber. The results show that thespecific impulse increases but the wall temperature also changes dramatically and evengoes beyond the admissible ability of the structure material with an increasing chamberpressure.