Effects of thermal and pressure loads on structural deformation of liquid oxygen/methane engine combustion chamber

To investigate the influences of thermal and pressure loads on the structural deformation of the Liquid Oxygen/Methane rocket engine combustion chamber, a complete thermo-structural analysis scheme including fluid-thermal analysis and structural finite element analysis is developed and then verified to be reasonable. By conducting fluid-thermal analysis, the detailed distribution of the thermal and pressure loads is obtained. These results are utilized as body loads and surface loads in structural finite element analysis. Then, the stress-strain responses of the combustion chamber and the accumulation process of the deformation induced by thermal and pressure loads were studied in detail. The main conclusions are as follows: Under the action of thermal loads alone, the most pronounced residual mechanical strain is at the upstream of the nozzle divergent segment. Reducing the temperature difference between the hot run and the pre-cooling phase can be a feasible improvement measure for this issue. Under the action of the pressure loads alone, the bottom of the cooling channel bends toward the centerline of the combustion chamber. Properly increasing the thickness of the channel bottom near the coolant inlet is deemed to be an effective measure to reduce this bending trend. Under the combined action of thermal and pressure loads, the structural deformation characteristics are determined by the combination of thermal loads and pressure loads, rather than mainly by thermal loads. The accumulation rate of mechanical strain at the channel bottom corner is much rapider than the other positions. Turning the sharp bottom corner of the cooling channel into rounded corner is an alternative method of suppressing strain accumulation.