Investigation on heat transfer in small hydrocarbon rocket combustion chambers

Whereas in Russia and the USA several rocket engines basing on hydrocarbon fuels have been developed and operated, European research focused on hydrogen with oxygen as well as hydrazine and its variants with nitrous oxides as rocket fuels in the last decades. In the course of constrained budgets and substitution of harmful substances the application of fuels like kerosene and methane has been reconsidered lately. The Institute for Flight Propulsion of Technische Universität München (Technical University of Munich) operates a kerosene/oxygen rocket combustion chamber test facility enabling fundamental research at application-oriented conditions. Within the framework of the EU-funded research project ATLLAS it served as testbed for investigations on heat transfer, film cooling, transpiration cooled fiber-reinforced ceramics and convectively cooled fiber-reinforced ceramics, whose results – combustion efficiencies, heat fluxes and temperature measurements – are an important part of this thesis. The experimental data serves as the base for design and validation of simple-to-use methods and correlations, which allow estimates of heat flux and cooling needs for the preliminary design of hydrocarbon fuel rocket engines.