Articles
Development Study of LOX/LH2, High Pressure Expander Cycle Engine
1988 年 4 巻 1 号 p. 1_11-1_20
詳細
1988 年 4 巻 1 号 p. 1_11-1_20
As known well, the expander cycle is advantageous in performance and reliability, but some limitations come from increasing chamber pressure and/or thrust. They are dominated inherently by the thermal energy absorbed by the regenerative coolant to drive the turbopump. In order to improve this problem to some extent, we have proposed the advanced concept thrust chamber in which an additional heat exchanger was installed to extract the larger amount of thermal energy from combustion (ref. 1). We have applied this concept for the LOX/LH2 high pressure expander cycle engine that is designated as HIPEX engine. Preliminary tests using a sub-scale engine made it clear that the combustion performance was not affected by installation of a heat exchanger within a combustion chamber, and the heat flux averaged over heat exchanger became approximately 70 percent of the value evaluated by Bartz’s correlation. In addition, wide thrust throttling (down to 23 percent of rated value) and restart capabilities were also verified. These test results revealed that the HIPEX engine delivering 140 kN of thrust at 10 MPa of chamber pressure is feasible. This paper describes the features of the HIPEX engine and the preliminary tests using the sub-scale engine.
