Static Characteristics of a Flow Regulator for a Liquid Rocket Engine

摘要

A FLOW regulator is one of the main control units for liquid rocket engines (LREs). It fulfills the following two functions: changing the flow rate to a gas generator or preburner for the thrust adjustment of the LRE and the automatically maintaining the flow rate to keep the LRE thrust within a specified range despite the change of pressure difference across the flow regulator. It is known that flow regulators have been widely used in Russian LREs. However, the literature related to flow regulators is not readily available, due to restrictions on the dissemination of information on rockets. A flow regulator of the direct-acting type was introduced and only the operating mechanism was briefly explained by Kozlov [1]. Also, Lebedinsky et al. [2] simulated numerically the steady-state performance of a similar flow regulator. However, they neither performed experiments nor analyses of the design parameters affecting the performance of their flow regulators. In the present Note, a new flow regulator of the direct-acting type shown in Fig. 1 is proposed. It is similar to the flow regulator proposed by Lebedinsky et al. [2], except an inlet pressure probe is added. The pressure probe makes the mathematical modeling of the flow regulator easier. It also plays the role of a damping unit, which can control transient response of the flow regulator although the dynamics of the flow regulator will not be considered in this Note. Design parameters, which affect the performance of the flow regulator, were identified through mathematical modeling and theoretical analysis. Experiments were also carried out. For the experiments, the flow regulator proposed in the present study was designed and fabricated. Experimental results of the flow regulator were compared with the simulation results of a mathematical model under steady-state conditions.