Modeling Fuel Film Cooling on a Flat Plate

Cooling of liquid rocket engine combustion chambers and nozzles is a critical component to liquid rocket engine design. A common method of cooling is liquid-fuel film cooling. Liquid fuel is injected along the surface of the wall to act as a barrier against the core combustion gases. A numerical model is developed for simulating a physical experimental test setup meant to study liquid-fuel film cooling over a flat plate using a hydrocarbon fuel. The model incorporates turbulent multiphase flow with species transport within a commercial computational fluid dynamics software package. Conjugate heat transfer is simulated through walls containing embedded cooling channels. A novel user-defined function is written to incorporate reactions between the liquid fuel and the freestream gases. Comparisons are made between simulations with and without the phase interactions, as well as with simplifications to the cooling channel geometry. It was found necessary to model the cooling channel geometry in order to avoid artificially reducing cooling performance.