Experimental investigation of thermal effect on cavitation characteristics in a liquid rocket engine turbopump inducer

Abstract

Abstract The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of water temperature on cavitation characteristics in a turbopump inducer, a series of experiments at different temperatures have been conducted in a newly developed visualization test facility. It is found that higher temperature shows little influence on the non-cavitation performance and breakdown characteristic in the investigated range. The relationship between cavitation development and pressure fluctuation has been discussed in detail. Higher temperature displays a remarkable stabilization effect on the cavitation excited pressure. In particular, the inception cavitation numbers of both the super-synchronous rotating cavitation and synchronous rotating cavitation are decreased at higher temperatures, and the corresponding frequencies are not affected, while the amplitudes are distinctly reduced, and the occurrence range of synchronous rotating cavitation is significantly narrowed. A generalized Rayleigh-Plesset equation has been employed to account for the thermal effect on the bubble development, which may provide a deep insight in understanding the experimental results. Thermal effect is found to act as a remarkable dissipation mechanism to suppress the bubble growth, smooth the collapse. In particular, the excited pressure during collapse is smaller at higher temperatures, which may lead to the stabilization effect of high temperature in this study.