Application of open-source software for industrial problems of vehicle lift-off gas dynamics

Abstract

High-power shock, heat, mechanical and especially acoustic loads present a serious problem as their impact on the rocket and the launch pad can be too strong. Turbulent supersonic jets ejected from the vehicle nozzles are the main source of these loads. One way to reduce the intensity of acoustic loads is to supply a special system of water jets that interact with the supersonic gas jets near the rocket nozzles. Numerical simulation of this interaction is an important part of the design of such noise reduction systems. The proposed numerical model should enable simulation of various processes of different scale, such as gas/droplets interaction, nozzle jets in the near field, acoustic loads in the far field, chemical reactions and others. Therefore, such a model should be modular and hierarchically aligned. A flexible and extensible implementation of the numerical model can be possible with open-source codes. This paper concerns the problem of numerical simulation of compressible turbulent supersonic jets. The hybrid gas dynamics solver which was used in this investigation is one of the main modules of the general numerical model. Preliminary results of verification of this module are presented. Comparison of numerical and experimental results for various experimental cases, both Russian and foreign, is given.

Keywords

• open-source codes
• gas dynamics
• acoustics
• hydrodynamics
• phase flows
• validation
• verification
• lift-off acoustics and gas dynamics
• spray atomization