Combustion chamber fluid dynamics and hypergolic gel propellant chemistry simulations for selectable thrust rocket engines

The Army is developing gelled bipropellants and tactical missile propulsion systems that utilize these propellants for future combat systems. The use of hypergolic gel propellants introduces new capabilities for selectable thrust missiles while at the same time introducing new challenges in combustion control, one of which is the mixing of oxidizer and fuel to obtain maximum performance without increasing the size of the engine. One of the Army's leading propulsion candidate's, the impinging stream vortex engine (ISVE), has generated excellent performance test data. Since the ISVE is a new concept, analytical models are just beginning to emerge. However, in order to fully exploit the performance advantages of the ISVE it is desirable to understand the underlying flow physics of the engine. This paper describes a high performance computing methodology that is producing simulations of the ISVE using computational fluid dynamics to model the chemically reacting flow within the engine and computational chemistry to characterize the hypergolic bipropellants.