English

Combustion Instability of a Multi-injector Rocket Engine Using the Flamelet Progress Variable Model

Fluid Dynamics 2021-09-03 v2

Abstract

The combustion instability is investigated computationally for a multi-injector rocket engine using the flamelet progress variable (FPV) model. A C++ code is developed based on OpenFOAM 4.0 to apply the combustion model. Flamelet tables are generated for methane/oxygen combustion at the background pressure of 200200 bar using a 12-species chemical mechanism. A power law is determined for rescaling the reaction rate for the progress variable to address the pressure effect. The combustion is also simulated by the one-step-kinetics (OSK) method for comparison with the FPV approach. A study of combustion instability shows that a longitudinal mode of 15001500 Hz and a tangential standing wave of 25002500 Hz are dominant for both approaches. While the amplitude of the longitudinal mode remains almost the same for both approaches, the tangential standing wave achieves a larger amplitude in the FPV simulation. A preliminary study of the resonance in the injectors, which is driven by the longitudinal-mode oscillation in the combustion chamber, is also presented.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.12046,
  title  = {Combustion Instability of a Multi-injector Rocket Engine Using the Flamelet Progress Variable Model},
  author = {Lei Zhan and Tuan M. Nguyen and Juntao Xiong and Feng Liu and William A. Sirignano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.12046},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:27:23.843Z