Development of Advanced Rocket Engine Technology for Precision Guided Missiles

The Army is developing hypergolic, liquid and gelled bipropellants for a small, selectable-thrust, liquid rocket engine (LRE) that can power tactical missiles for both current and future combat systems. The use of gel propellants brings the advantages of selectable thrust and the promise of small engine size but also introduces new challenges in combustion control. One of these challenges is the efficient mixing of gelled oxidizer and fuel to obtain maximum performance from the LRE combustor without increasing the size of the engine. The Army’s impinging stream vortex engine, ISVE, offers an efficient alternative to increasing the combustion chamber volume of a LRE and has already generated excellent performance test data. Since the ISVE is a new concept, analytical models that relate engine performance to engine design parameters are just beginning to emerge. In order to fully exploit the performance that have been realized for the ISVE, it is desirable to understand the underlying flow physics of the engine. This paper describes the Army’s effort to use multidimensional, multiphase computational fluid dynamics, combined with high-performance computers to generate simulations of the ISVE that reveal combustion patterns as well as predict chamber pressure and thrust levels for the engine. The goal is to utilize this computational tool to optimize the ISVE performance for a host of strategic Army missions.