High-Fidelity Multiphysics Simulations of Nozzle Erosion

A collaborative effort is proposed between IllinoisRocstar LLC and the University of Illinois to develop and commercialize a computational framework to investigate nozzle erosion in solid-propellant rocket motors (SRM) and tangential instability modes in liquid rocket engines (LRE). For SRM, highly resolved simulations will be performed to understand the effects of turbulent inlet conditions, as well as nozzle vectoring, on nozzle erosion. The thermal boundary layer is captured along the nozzle walls to compute the heat flux and erosion rates. To optimize the computational resources, the SRM nozzle configuration is studied by itself and appropriate inflow conditions are imposed. Two complementary formulations to apply these inlet conditions are described: the first is based on extracting the flow field from the full motor configuration for turbulent flows; while the second invokes a multiscale asymptotic analysis of turbulent flows inside rocket motor. Preliminary results suggest that specifying turbulent, rather than uniform, inlet conditions has a significant effect on nozzle erosion. For LRE, a full three-dimensional configuration is proposed to investigate tangential instabilities.