On Computing Losses in Blading Sections of Liquid Rocket Engine Pressurisation Stations

Abstract

Designing more sophisticated contemporary liquid rocket engines requires a precise understanding of the hydrodynamics in the blading sections of the pressurisation station, which is most often a turbopump. Friction loss in blade passages and outlets forms a significant proportion of all losses. The paper shows that it is necessary to account for the initial region of hydrodynamically unbalanced flow in the boundary layer, which is most characteristic of relatively short passages in blading sections of liquid rocket engine turbopumps. We performed the analysis required to select friction drag laws for components of pressurisation station blading sections. We considered and proposed a method for numerically integrating a system of equations to determine the variation in characteristic thickness of a spatial boundary layer and friction loss, accounting for the inertial component of the flow core velocity, depending on which flow modes occur in the components of pressurisation station blading sections in a liquid rocket engine. We show that it is necessary to correctly select the friction laws and to take the initial region into account so as to precisely determine the power parameters