• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.18-25
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• 2004

Multi plume effects on the base heating have been Investigated with a CFD program. As the flight altitude increases, the plume expansion angle increases regardless of the single or clustered engine. The plume interaction of the clustered engine makes a high temperature thermal shear in the center of four plumes. At low altitude, the high temperature shear flow stays in the center of plumes, but it increases up to engine base with the increasing altitude. At high altitude, the flow from plume to base and the flow from base into outer free stream are supersonic, which transfers the high heat in the center of plumes to the base region. The radiative heat of the clustered engine varies from 220 kW/m² to 469 kW/m² with increasing altitude while those of the single engine are 10 kW/m² and 43.7 kW/m². And the base temperature of the clustered engine varies from 985K to 1223K, and those of the single engine are 483K and 726K. This big radiative heat of clustered engine can be explained by the active high temperature base flow and strong plume interactions.

• Aerospace Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.78-83
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• 2012

Generally, the first stage of a launch vehicle requires high thrust to achieve a mission. We can use one high thrust level engine or a clustered engine system which made of several small thrust level engines to make high thrust. The first stage propulsion system of KSLV-II has 300tf thrust to satisfy the mission. But it is impractical to make high thrust by one engine at this moment in time. So we should cluster four 75tf class engines which can be applied to make a required thrust for the first stage propulsion system. This article deals with the concept of the first stage clustered engine arrangement of KSLV-II.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.78-84
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• 2011

CFD simulation has been conducted on a small scaled 4 nozzle clustered engine operating with air. In the present paper, the effects of grid size, turbulence models, flux difference methods have been compared. The results show that the base flows are somewhat different as the turbulence models, while Roe and AUSM flux differences produced almost the same results. Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model produces more accurate results rather than famous SST k-w model. The calculated Mach number and pressure profile in the engine base reveal the complex base flow structure, which is somewhat different from the generally estimated flow fields.

• Aerospace Engineering and Technology
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.179-185
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• 2005

It is an essential subject to decrease the mass of a launch vehicle for improving performance and efficiency of space launch system. Particularly, reducing the engine supporting area is necessary for high efficiency of propulsion system with clustered engine systems. The engine supporting area is related to the branch location of the oxidizer feeding line. This article deals the performance variation of the propulsion system such as the mass of the oxidizer feeding line, pressurization pressure of the oxidizer tank, and the onset of nucleation boiling in the oxidizer pipe with the branch location of the main feeding line.

• Aerospace Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.68-77
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• 2012

Flow characteristics of base region of small scaled 4 nozzle clustered engine has been analyzed with CFD approach along with the tests of numerical methods. The numerical test shows that Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model is appropriate for the present research. Plumes expanded from nozzles exits collide with each other and make high pressure stagnation region. Some of collided plumes expand again reversely into the base region with supersonic speeds. The reversed plume in the base region goes out to the outer region through the minimum vent area formed by the nearest nozzle exterior surfaces. But different from the empirical theory, the minimum vent area does not play a role of throat. Additionally the temperature of the nozzle inner surface strongly affects the temperature of the reversed plumes.

• 한국전산유체공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.03b
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• pp.432-435
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• 2008

Launch vehicle for injecting the satellite into its orbit is composed with propulsion system, guidance and navigation system, telemetry and so on. Among the others, the propulsion system is the most important part, because that is the key factor of failure of launch vehicle. Especially, the most of failures were occurred in time of engine startup. Therefore, the study of the conditions for stable engine startup is needed at the first step of development. The many researches were accomplished for mathematical modeling, stable startup engine and control of liquid propellant rocket engine. But the cavitation problem that can be occurred at an inlet of pump associated with propellant feeding system wasn't considered in these works. In this paper, propulsion system model was integrated with clustered engines and propellant feeding system for the simulations of engine startup. As the results of simulations, the requirements were deduced for the stable engine startup without the cavitation at an inlet of pump.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2004.03a
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• pp.521-523
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• 2004

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has proposed new vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft known as the Jet-VTOL aircraft shown in Fig.1. The Jet-VTOL aircraft is based on a canard wing configuration. The aircraft has the clustered lift-fans mounted near the center of gravity for vertical flight, and has the clustered fans mounted beside the vertical tail for cruise flight. Both fans are driven by the core engine mounted inside the aft end of fuselage. The propulsion system is innovative and attractive not to be seen even in the world.

• 한국가시화정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.12a
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• pp.75-80
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• 2004

Aerospike nozzles have been expected to be used for an engine of a reusable space shuttle to respond to growing demand for rocket-launching and its cost reduction. In this study, the flow field structures in any cross sections around clustered linear aerospike nozzles are visualized and analyzed, using laser induced fluorescence (LIF) of nitrogen monoxide seeded in the carrier gas of nitrogen. Since flow field structures are affected mainly by pressure ratio, the clustered linear aerospike nozzle is set inside a vacuum chamber to carry out the experiments in the wide range of pressure ratios from 75 to 200. Flow fields are visualized in several cross-sections, demonstrating the complicated three-dimensional flow field structures. Pressure sensitive paint (PSP) of PtTFPP bound by poly- IBM -co-TFEM is also applied to measurement of the complicated pressure distribution on the spike surface, and to verification of contribution of a truncation plane to the thrust. Finally, to examine the effect of the sidewalls attached to the aerospike nozzle, the flow fields around the nozzle with the sidewalls are compared with those without sidewalls.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.857-862
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• 2011

3 dimensional turbine exhaust gas flow was simplified to an axisymmetrical flow and calculated with detailed chemistry models. GRI 35 species-217 reaction step model and simplified 11 species 15 reaction model was applied to the secondary reaction of the turbine exhaust gas and compared. All the model captured the secondary combustion on the base region, and the temperature was 600K higher than that without turbine exhaust gas. This means the local temperature of the base can be higher in the case of real 3 dimensional flow. The simplified model show the similar results to the GRI detailed chemistry model although the former affected the engine plume structure slightly.

• 한국전산유체공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.275-278
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• 2006

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has introduced a new terascale clusterd SMP system as a main compute engine of Numerical Simulator III for aerospace science and engineering research purposes. The system is using Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER HPC2500; it has computing capability of 9.3Tflop/s peak performance and 3.6TB of user memory, with about 1,800 scalar processors for computation. In this paper, we first present the performance evaluation results for aerospace CFD applications with hybrid programming paradigm used at JAXA. Next we propose a performance prediction formula for hybrid codes based on a simple extension of AMhhal's law, and discuss about the predicted and measured performances for some typical hybrid CFD codes.