Potential Early Applications of Advanced Effusion Cooled Ceramic Combustion Chambers

Abstract

Technologies for porous effusion or transpiration cooled ceramic combustion chambers are under investi-gation at DLR since a couple of years. Research concentrates on applying transpiration cooling to C/C liners as a candidate technology to fulfill the requirements of future cryogenic (LOX/LH2) liquid rocket engines, taking advantage of interesting features of C/C liners such as low weight as well as potentially increased reliability and life time of the rocket engine. A fully ceramic combustion chamber including noz-zle is currently foreseen to be testfired in early 2011 (see Figure 1!). The question when and in which application a ceramic combustion chamber can first be used in a launcher propulsion system becomes now more imminent. The introduction of this new technology in any existing relatively large European launch vehicle like Vega or Ariane without prior successful space flight application is unlikely. A first potential future use of the effusion cooled engine is more likely in a com-pletely new vehicle of smaller size. DLR has investigated a few design options of upper stages with low thrust (up to 10 kN) ceramic engine with hydrogen and oxygen propellants. Some of these types investigated in the multi-national study Aldé-baran [1] or in a technology assessment together with Astrium for the German space agency [2] are de-scribed in this paper.