Large-Eddy Simulations of Methane-Oxygen Combustion in a Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-3642.vid Rotating detonation engines (RDEs) are a novel class of pressure gain combustion devices that are well-suited for high-speed propulsion applications, as they offer significant advantages over deflagrative combustion in terms of pressure gain from reactants to products, faster heat release, higher thermal efficiency, and higher thrust. Well-validated computational tools capable of capturing the operational characteristics in realistic RDE configurations can provide critical insights, and can be further utilized to improve and optimize RDE design. To this end, high-fidelity large-eddy simulations (LES) with detailed chemistry (12 species, 37 reactions) are performed to capture the supersonic combustion phenomena in a full-scale methane-oxygen non-premixed rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE). The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach employs adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to achieve a good trade-off between simulation runtime and accuracy. Three different operating conditions are simulated. Overall, it is demonstrated that the high-fidelity LES modeling approach is able to predict the main qualitative and quantitative features of detonation wave dynamics (number of waves, wave speed, and axial pressures) and their sensitivity to operating conditions reasonably well.