Investigation of full-scale porous injector plate transpiration cooling coupled with combustion in high-thrust H2/O2 rocket engines

The high chamber pressure and large heat flux impose greater demands on the structure cooling and thermal protection of the future high-thrust H2/O2 rocket engine. To investigate the applicability of transpiration cooling on the full-scale injector plate in the high-thrust rocket engine, a numerical model is presented, in which the porous region and the mainstream hot gas region are directly coupled. The local equilibrium model and eddy dissipation model are considered. The numerical model is validated by transpiration cooling experiments for a subscale rocket engine injector plate. Then, the numerical simulation of transpiration cooling for the high-thrust H2/O2 rocket engine injector plate shows that the transpiration cooling with 13% of the total hydrogen mass flow rate can reduce the gas side temperature of the injector plate by about 150 K and reduce the thermal penetration depth to 9.2% of the plate thickness. Moreover, As the coolant mass flow rate increase from 4% to 13%, the gas side temperature of the plate decreases from 735 K to 668 K and the cooling effectiveness rises. The lower the coolant inlet temperature, the lower the plate temperature, but the higher the cooling effectiveness. Besides, the plate temperature drops with the decreases of the thermal conductivity of the porous media.

Automated summary

This study investigates the cooling and thermal protection for future high-thrust H2/O2 rocket engines. A numerical model based on transpiration cooling is presented and validated by experiments. The results show that transpiration cooling with 13% of the total hydrogen mass flow rate can significantly reduce the gas side temperature of the injector plate and the thermal penetration depth. Increasing the coolant mass flow rate and decreasing the coolant inlet temperature can further improve the cooling effectiveness, and reducing the thermal conductivity of the porous media can lower the plate temperature.