The canting axis of thrusters on space platforms, which likely operate in a vacuum environment with a high degree of flow rarefaction, is significant in order to create the desired torque for maneuvering, maintaining orbit, eliminating perturbation forces, docking, etc. Therefore, the interactions of expanding plumes with one another and with solid surfaces in multinozzle arrays are inevitable. To gain a better understanding of the effect of nozzle configurations and conditions on the plume–plume and plume–surface interactions, a simulation matrix is carried out for a sonic nozzle using the direct simulation Monte Carlo method with the dsmcFoam+ code. As nozzle arrays are packed more tightly together, the plume–plume interactions become stronger, which has an influence on the stagnation line density and temperature profiles. For a given stagnation temperature, the spacing between nozzles in the array does not have a strong influence on the normalized surface pressure, but there is an increase in the maximum normalized shear stress as the distance between the nozzles increases. There is a significant difference in the results for double and quadruple nozzle arrays, with greater normalized stagnation pressures and shear stresses found as the number of nozzles in the array is increased. For a single nozzle, increasing the stagnation temperature does not have a significant effect on the normalized surface pressures, but does increase the maximum normalized shear stress and increases the measured heat flux on the surface. For arrays of double and quadruple nozzles, the number of nozzles has a much greater influence on the measured surface properties than the stagnation temperature.
Impact of Stagnation Temperature and Nozzle Configuration on Rarefied Jet Plume Interactions
Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets ; 59 , 5 ; 1536-1551
2022-04-28
16 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Flow-angle measurements in a rarefied nozzle plume
AIAA | 1987
|STAGNATION REGION IN RAREFIED, HIGH MACH NUMBER FLOW
AIAA | 1963
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