Cooling of High-Pressure Rocket Thrust Chambers with Liquid Oxygen

An experimental program using hydrogen and oxygen as the propellants and supercritical liquid oxygen (LOX) as the coolant was conducted at 4.14 and 8.274 MN/sq m chamber pressure. It was aimed to demonstrate the effect of LOX leaking into the combustion region through small cracks in the chamber wall, and to verify the supercritical oxygen heat transfer correlation developed from heated tube experiments. Four thrust chambers with throat diameters of 0.066 m were tested; three of these were cyclically tested to 4.14 MM/sq m chamber pressure until a crack developed; the fourth chamber was operated at 8.274 MM/sq m pressure to obtain steady state heat transfer data. Wall temperature measurements confirmed the heat transfer correlation.