Simulations of longitudinal combustion instabilities in a LOX-CH4 Liquid Rocket Engine

Kurzfassung

The present paper studies combustion dynamics in a single injector, cryogenic CH4/O2 rocket combustor at subcritical pressures. Such conditions are usually encountered in deep-throttlable engines, needed for launcher reuse. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is employed with a homogeneous multi-fluid approach and real gas thermodynamics to simulate the DLR BKN experimental combustion chamber. After presenting the experiment and simulation setups, numerical results are compared with experimental data from stable and unstable regimes, providing valuable insights into the accuracy and limitations of the employed numerical models.