Analysis of the Flow in LOX Manifold in Liquid Rocket

The flow in the LOX manifold of liquid rocket has been investigated using a CAE technique with an objective of economical modeling of injection holes in order to reduce the overall computational cost of flow analysis during the optimal rocket design procedure. The computational geometry is very close to that of the actual rocket design and the flow condition through the injection holes resembles that in the actual manifold of the liquid rocket. The result shows that the flow in the plane just above the injection holes is not uniformly distributed in terms of pressure and mass flow rate and this is attributed to the large-scale flow patterns present the LOX manifold. Thus, the flow physics should be understood correctly before making any attempt to model the injection holes. In the present study, several boundary conditions which were designed to effectively replace the presence of injection holes have been tested and it was found that a simple modeling can be possible by mimicking the actual geometry of the injection holes. By using this simple injection hole modeling, it was able to obtain about 30% reduction in computational cost but it was still able to reproduce the flow patterns correctly. Also the flow has been analyzed after incorporating a couple of different types of pre-distributors in LOX manifold and the effect of those will be discussed.