Confined Submerged Jet Enhancement of Regenerative Cooling Heat Transfer Coefficients in Liquid Rocket Engines

ABSTRACT: In the proposed effort, ASI will demonstrate the feasibility of a practical, proven method for significantly increasing the heat transfer coefficient inside regenerative cooling channels. The technique, used in the electronics industry for high heat flux removal applications, requires one additional manufacturing step and a small change to the coolant inlet manifolding scheme. The technology has been shown to offer as much as a 3-fold increase in heat transfer coefficient, which would significantly increase the heat pickup of hydrogen coolant in an expander cycle engine. Such an increase would offer substantial increases in chamber pressure and thrust to future expander cycle engines. BENEFIT: Substantial increases in chamber pressure and thrust would result from the successful development of the proposed technology. Our commercialization goal is to insert our innovation into a future blcok upgrade to the venerable RL10 engine.