Effect of Different Flame Deflectors Plate Geometry on Supersonic Jet Impingement Flow and Heat Characteristics from Rocket Exhaust

Abstract

The numerical investigation has been carried out on an under-expanded supersonic jet impingement on the perpendicular and inclined deflector plates of various shapes, such as flat, sinusoidal, and wedge types. The numerical study considers flat plates at Mach number of 2.2, and pressure ratio of 1.2, and results of flow and heat transfers are obtained using the Reynolds averaged Naiver Stokes (RANS) two-equation turbulence models. Various two-equation models (especially Standard k-ε, Reynolds Normalization Group k-ε, Realizable k-ε, Shear Stress Transport k-ω, and Baseline k-ω) were employed to predict the deflector’s surface temperature and pressure ratios. The pressure ratios are plotted with various two-equation turbulence models, and it is observed that among all turbulence models, the Shear Stress Transport k-ω shows close agreement with experimental results. Moreover, among the three deflectors, the wedge-shaped deflector shows improved performance in deflecting the rocket exhaust plume away from the surface. However, the maximum temperature on the deflector surface for a wedge-shaped deflector is 8.19% and 26% higher than the flat and sinusoidal-shaped deflectors, respectively.

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the Department of Science and Technology (SERB), New Delhi, under the early career research award; Project Ref. No. ECR/2016/001364, for the computational facility to carry out the numerical study in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at NIT Manipur, Manipur, India.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dushyant Singh

Dushyant Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Dr B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar, (Punjab) - India. He finished his Doctorate Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2014. He was a postdoctoral researcher in joint research industrial project work with BHEL industry in IIT Delhi. He had been a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Institute of Technology Manipur-India. His research interests include experimental and computational fluid flow – heat transfer, turbulence, and two-phase heat transfer enhancement.

Thanggoulen Hmangte

Thanggoulen Hmangte is a Master’s Degree Program: Thermal and Fluids Engineering student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at National Institute of Technology Manipur, India. He obtained Bachelor’s in Engineering from N.E.C. Erode - Tamil Nadu, India. His topic of research is supersonic flow.

Ashutosh Kumar Singh

Ashutosh Kumar Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Imphal West, India. He received his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering with a Gold Medal in academics from Giani Zail Singh PTU Campus Bathinda, Punjab in 2015 and was selected by the MHRD NIT-IIT Trainee Teacher Scheme in 2016. He did Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering (Specialization: Fluids and Thermal Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, in 2018 and subsequently did his Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2023. His research interests include heat transfer, turbulent flow, and experimental-numerical cooling techniques.