A J Sharjad
Micro/nanofluidics Research Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering Trivandrum, Kerala, India - 695016
B S Bijo
Micro/nanofluidics Research Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering Trivandrum, Kerala, India - 695016
S Kumar Ranjith
Micro/nanofluidics Research Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering Trivandrum, Kerala, India - 695016
The secondary injection is an effective strategy to obtain
lateral thrust force in a rocket nozzle to control vectoring.
The present study aims to investigate the performance of secondary injection thrust vector control(SITVC)in a planar convergent-divergent nozzle(CDN). Here, the flow is assumed to be two-dimensional, steady, compressible and turbulent. Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved along with the two-equation SST k − ω turbulence model using ANSYS Fluent. Firstly, the simulation procedure is validated against the experimental data. Thereafter, simulations of secondary injection through dual injector ports fitted in the diverging section of CDN are performed. The secondary injection causes complex shock patterns both at upstream and downstream of the injector due to the flow deflection. The flow deflection is due to interaction forces generated due to the pressure imbalance between the nozzle wall and the jet reaction force in addition to the surplus momentum of the secondary injectant. The influence of secondary pressure ratio, injection location and the inter distance between the injectors on SITVC performance is studied in detail. The results demonstrated that a CDN fitted with multiple injectors exhibited superior performance in terms of thrust control.