Fuel Regression Rate Behavior of CAMUI Hybrid Rocket

Abstract

A series of static firing tests was conducted to investigate the fuel regression characteristics of a Cascaded Multistage Impinging-jet (CAMUI) type hybrid rocket motor. A CAMUI type hybrid rocket uses the combination of liquid oxygen and a fuel grain made of polyethylene as a propellant. The collision distance divided by the port diameter, H/D, was varied to investigate the effect of the grain geometry on the fuel regression rate. As a result, the H/D geometry has little effect on the regression rate near the stagnation point, where the heat transfer coefficient is high. On the contrary, the fuel regression rate decreases near the circumference of the forward-end face and the backward-end face of fuel blocks. Besides the experimental approaches, a method of computational fluid dynamics clarified the heat transfer distribution on the grain surface with various H/D geometries. The calculation shows the decrease of the flow velocity due to the increase of H/D on the area where the fuel regression rate decreases with the increase of H/D. To estimate the exact fuel consumption, which is necessary to design a fuel grain, real-time measurement by an ultrasonic pulse-echo method was performed.