Numerical Study on the Hydrodynamic Performance Prediction of Turbopump Inducers

터보펌프 인듀서의 수치해석을 통한 성능예측

The inducers in liquid-rocket engines are to increase the inlet pressure of the pump to avoid any malfunction due to cavitation. Inducers are typically designed to be operated with some amount of cavitation for the compactness of the turbopump system. Also, inducers are designed to produce low headrise to prevent the decrease of the overall pump efficiency due to the low efficiency of inducers. In the present paper, a computational study on the hydrodynamic behavior of the inducer for the rocket-engine turbopump are presented including the effect of the mass flow rate under the constant rotational speed. As the mass flow rate is decreased, the inducer showed better performance with strong back flows which may have deleterious effects upon the anti-cavitation ability. But the adopted inducer showed very low headrise with high volume flow rates, which may be caused by the small passage area near the trailing edge. The modified version of the present inducer is proposed and numerically evaluated, which in turn showed better results.