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The liquid rocket engine, more specifically, the bi-propellant liquid rocket engine, is a popular type of chemical propulsion system within the propulsion industry due to its relatively high specific impulse and high thrust levels compared to the other chemical propulsion choices. For the purposes of this thesis, a bi-propellant liquid rocket engine system consists of a rocket engine, a set of tanks for the storage and supply of liquid propellants, and everything required in between for thrust-producing operation. Among the hardware in this "in between" necessary for a liquid rocket engine to produce thrust exists an injector, or an assembly of injector elements, whose purpose is to introduce and meter the flow of the fuel and oxidizer of the liquid rocket engine into the combustion chamber. To do this the injector or injector assembly, upon injection into the combustion chamber, must cause the two liquids to break up into small droplets, proportionally and uniformly distribute and mix the liquid into a spray pattern within the combustion chamber, and allow for engine combustion to occur as efficiently as possible. Daedalus Astronautics @ ASU, one of Arizona State University's engineering student organizations, has been working to design, construct, and successfully test a bi-propellant liquid rocket engine of its own. In doing so, Daedalus Astronautics has designed a bi-propellant liquid rocket engine injector assembly consisting of a forward bulkhead and an injector plate. The purpose of this thesis is to experimentally verify the flow of liquid through this injector assembly modeled using computational fluid dynamics methods. During the two semester time line allowed for this thesis project, a mesh was created for a single orifice geometry injector plate and combustion chamber assembly in ANSYS ICEM CFD and an experiment was designed for imaging the spray pattern from the injector plate and forward bulkhead assembly, from which several things about the injector geometry design were discovered.
ContributorsBrunacini, Lauren Elizabeth (Author) / Herrmann, Marcus (Thesis director) / Adrian, Ronald (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis focused on verifying previous literature and research that has been conducted on different spherical objects. Mainly, verifying literature that examines both how surface roughness contributes to the overall drag and how wake turbulence is affected by different surface roughness. The goal of this project is to be able to capture data that shows that the flow transition from laminar to turbulent occurs at lower Reynolds numbers for a rough spherical object rather than a perfectly smooth sphere. In order to achieve this goal, both force balance testing and hot-wire testing were conducted in the Aero-lab complex in USE170. The force balance was mounted and used in the larger wind tunnel while the hot-wire probe was mounted and used in the smaller wind tunnel. Both of the wind tunnels utilized LABVIEW software in order to collect and convert the qualitative values provided by the testing probes and equipment. The two main types of testing equipment that were used in this project were the force balance and the hot-wire probe. The overall results from the experiment were inconclusive based on the limitations of both the testing probes and the testing facility itself. Overall, the experiment yielded very limited results due to these limitations.
ContributorsMilroy, Maxwell (Author) / Takahashi, Timothy (Thesis director) / Adrian, Ronald (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) has become a cornerstone of modern experimental fluid mechanics due to its unique ability to resolve the entire instantaneous two-dimensional velocity field of an experimental flow. However, this methodology has historically been omitted from undergraduate curricula due to the significant cost of research-grade PIV systems and safety considerations stemming from the high-power Nd-YAG lasers typically implemented by PIV systems. In the following undergraduate thesis, a low-cost model of a PIV system is designed to be used within the context of an undergraduate fluid mechanics lab. The proposed system consists of a Hele-Shaw water tunnel, a high-power LED lighting source, and a modern smartphone camera. Additionally, a standalone application was developed to perform the necessary image processing as well as to perform Particle Streak Velocimetry (PSV) and PIV image analysis. Ultimately, the proposed system costs $229.33 and can replicate modern PIV techniques albeit for simple flow scenarios.
ContributorsZamora, Matthew Alan (Author) / Adrian, Ronald (Thesis director) / Kim, Jeonglae (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Atomization of fluids inside combustion chamber has been a very complex and long-lasting subject that is still researched into for maximum efficiency in mixing oxidizer and fuel. This thesis focuses on an injector called the Liquid-Liquid Swirl Coaxial Injector (LLSC) to be used in a small-scale rocket engine due to its high efficiency in spray angles and low pressure drops. Injectors are the elements that exist as a connection in between the plumbing and the combustion chamber of the rocket engine. The performance of injectors can greatly affect the stability and efficiency of the engine. Injectors proportionally help breakup the fluid into small droplets that help in the efficiency of vaporization of fluids while combusting. Helios Rocketry, Arizona State University’s student-led engineering organization, is working to design and successfully launch a small-scale bi-propellant liquid rocket engine to a 100 km (Karman Line) in space as part of the Base11 challenge. For this task a highly efficient injector element needed to be designed that can achieve high amounts of atomization with a large spray angle, to help with combustion in a relatively small sized chamber. The purpose of this thesis is to explore a specific type of injector element called a LLSC injector element. This is performed by simulating it through an LES model in computational fluid dynamics using a Voronoi based meshing scheme, by using codes from Cascade Technologies. In the end a 35-injector element design was used for an injector plate. This helped minimize the pressure drop and keep the wall stress below the safety limit.
ContributorsDave, Himanshu Hitendra (Author) / Herrmann, Marcus (Thesis director) / Adrian, Ronald (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05