ケーシングトリートメントによるインデューサのキャビテーション不安定の抑制

抄録

In high speed turbopump inducers for rocket engines, cavitation occurs and often causes flow instabilities. In the present study, we tried to suppress all cavitation instabilities by adding swirl breakers to an original circumferential groove of a casing in wide ranges of flow rates in consideration of coming reusable rockets. The casing with swirl breakers succeeded in the suppression of almost all cavitation instabilities without degradations of pump and suction performances by suppressing backflow vortex cavitation. The swirl breaker drastically decreased circumferential velocities near the tip of the leading edge of the inducer and also created a circumferential strong vortex which suppressed a backflow. This is a mechanism of the suppression of backflow vortex cavitation.