Regenerative cooling is still one of key technologies to develop high performance liquid rocket engines. To achieve high efficiency and reliability, understanding and accurate prediction of flowfield and heat transfer characteristics in regeneratively cooled thrust chambers are prerequisite. In the current study, a fully conjugated combustion and heat transfer simulation for full-scale regeneratively cooled thrust chambers was proposed and demonstrated for the LE-5B thrust chamber. In the proposed strategy, the injection and combustion processes in the hot-gas side, heat conduction in the chamber wall, and cooling channel flows are taken into account based on three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulation. The computed results were validated against measured data from a hot firing test, showing reasonable agreement except for chamber outer wall temperatures. Detailed three-dimensional flow and thermal characteristics in the thrust chamber were clarified in the hot-gas side and the coolant side domains. Although the proposed numerical approach needs to be further improved quantitatively, it was confirmed that the present methodology is promising to understand and precisely predict flowfield and heat transfer characteristics in regeneratively cooled thrust chambers.
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