Integration of High-Pressure Combustion Experiments and Simulations

An innovative method for integrating experimental design with computational flowfield methodology for developing advanced liquid rocket combustors is proposed. Despite dramatic advancements in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and diagnostic instrumentation, rocket engine designers still rely on antiquated experimental data bases. The gap between on-going experiments and real design issues is not yielding sufficient validation data. The proposed research will identify critical physical combustion problems, hypothesize experiments to elucidate the problem, simulate the experiment with CFD to locate necessary validation measurements, specify an appropriate instrumentation system, oversee the experiment, and synthesize the results. The utility of this new methodology will be demonstrated by critiquing existing experiments and planning new research projects.