Computational Study of Chamber Wall Thermal Effects and Heat Flux in a Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine

Rotating detonation rocket engines (RDRE) have the potential to achieve higher performance and efficiency than conventional rocket engines. High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations aid the design, discovery, and description of physical phenomena exhibited in RDREs. To date, many simulations overpredict global performance metrics, such as chamber pressure, thrust, and ISP, when compared with experimental measurements. In this study, we investigate the thermal losses within the RDRE chamber using high-fidelity CFD and conjugate heat transfer simulations. Results show that switching from an adiabatic to an isothermal wall boundary condition recovers as much as 8% of RDRE simulation performance overprediction. We further analyze the effect that cooled chamber walls have on RDRE dynamics. Surrogate, transient conjugate heat transfer simulations provide estimates of the heat flux to the chamber walls and are compared with the high-fidelity simulations. Both the heat transfer and high-fidelity simulations show a wall heat flux on the order of 10 to 20 megawatts per square meter..