Compartmental Tank Propellant Management System Design And Operation For Hypersonic Vehicle

摘要

The near-space hyper-sonic vehicle is usually boosted by a rocket booster or carrier aircraft, and it will be dropped from the rocket booster or carrier aircraft after the scheduled flight altitude and speed has been obtained. Then the vehicle will perform autonomous flight mission including starting, accelerating, climbing, maneuvering flight and loop flight. The complex flight mission and trajectory caused a complex change of the thrust and aerodynamic force (drag and lift). The liquid propellant stored in the tank also presents complex movement because of the complex force change. The centroid displacement and the sloshing problem of liquid propellant become prominent. The overall scheme design of near-space hyper-sonic vehicle pressurization feed system need to solve the following three key technical problems: 1) reliable transport of liquid propellant under the complex overload affection; 2) the centroid displacement control of the liquid propellant; 3) liquid propellant sloshing suppression. The compartmental tank propellant management system is a new type of propellant management mode which is developed to adapt to the near space high speed maneuvering flight, especially fit the condition of using a great length-diameter ratio tank and complex overload change. This propellant management mode has been successfully employed in the X-15/X-34 verification vehicle in America and several supersonic cruise missiles. But related reports about compartmental tank propellant management system are relatively few, the work about overall scheme design and analytical method were not detailed introduced so far. And several researchers even thought that the compartmental tank will cause the structure complexity to increase greatly, the effect is very limited in centroid displacement control and sloshing suppression. To solve this problem, the research about the compartmental tank propellant management system and overall scheme design were performed in this paper. A liquid propellant centroid displacement control and sloshing suppression model has been established to simulate and evaluate the compartmental tank, the simulation results will be greatly support the overall scheme design.