Numerical and experimental study on high-speed hydrogen–oxygen combustion gas flow and aerodynamic heating characteristics

The need to increase the payload capacity of the rockets motivates the development of high-power rocket engines. For a chemical propulsion system, this results in an increasing thermal load on the structure, especially the combustion chamber and nozzle must be able to withstand the extreme thermal load caused by high-temperature and high-pressure combustion gas. In order to protect the structure from the effect of increasing heat flux, it is necessary to counteract such effect with more advanced thermal management technology. This requires us to accurately predict the aerodynamic heating of the structure by high-temperature and high-speed combustion gas. In this study, a high-temperature combustion gas tunnel developed in the laboratory is used to produce high-speed combustion gas. Combined with the results of numerical calculation, the flow and aerodynamic heating characteristics of air and hydrogen–oxygen combustion gas under the same total temperature and pressure are analyzed and compared. The comparison revealed that the combustion gas flow in the nozzle has higher static temperature, velocity, and smaller Mach number. When the combustion gas flows around the sphere, the shock standoff distance and stagnation pressure are smaller than those of air, and the wall heat flux is much larger than that of air. The active chemical reaction in the combustion gas makes the aerodynamic heating of the structure more severe. Finally, through the analysis of a large amount of data, a semi-empirical formula for the heat flux of the stagnation point heated by a high-speed hydrogen and oxygen equivalent ratio combustion gas is obtained.