Comparison of water and cryogenic fluid hammer experiments for rocket engine feed line systems

Abstract

Fluid hammer occurs when a flow in a pipeline is rapidly stopped due to valve closure or shutting down a pump. The resulting pressure wave can reach very high amplitudes, depending on the fluid properties and the flow velocity. In spacecrafts and launchers, where the reduction of weight is always an important design goal, it is not possible to build the structure arbitrarily robust. Understanding the transient behaviour of the fluids is necessary to predict mechanical loads on the structure and align the design to them. Since a lot of launchers use reactive, cryogenic propellants, it is a common approach to use inert substitute fluids for on ground testing like water (H2O) or liquid nitrogen (LN2). LN2 comes with the advantage of being cryogenic like real propellants, but ground testing is consequently more complex than with H2O. For this purpose, several fluid hammer experiments with both fluids were performed and compared to each other to provide a foundation for deciding which substitute fluid would be useful. Graphical abstract

Cryogenic propellant management in space: open challenges and perspectives

“…If the thermal-hydrodynamic disturbances generate large-amplitude flow oscillations and hydraulic shocks (fluid-hammer), a loss of thermal-flow control and mechanical damages might occur 108 . While several investigations have been performed to study cryogenic fluid-hammer in gravity conditions 109 – 111 , microgravity experiments are still limited 112 , 113 . The summary of gaps in physical knowledge and their application for fluid transfer operations is show in Table 10 .…”