Cooling Effect of Water Injection on a High-Temperature Supersonic Jet

Abstract

The high temperature and high pressure supersonic jet is one of the key problems in the design of solid rocket motors. To reduce the jet temperature and noise, cooling water is typically injected into the exhaust plume. Numerical simulations for the gas-liquid multiphase flow field with mixture multiphase model were developed and a series of experiments were carried out. By introducing the energy source terms caused by the vaporization of liquid water into the energy equation, a coupling solution was developed to calculate the multiphase flow field. The temperature data predictions agreed well with the experimental results. When water was injected into the plume, the high temperature core region area was reduced, and the temperature on the head face was much lower than that without water. The relationship between the reduction of temperature on the bottom plate and the momentum ratio is developed, which can be used to predict the cooling effect of water injection in many cases.