Role of precombustion chamber design in feed-system coupled instabilities of hybrid rockets

Oxidizer feed-system coupled instabilities have been observed in several liquid and hybrid propellant rocket engines, although they are not likely to be catastrophic for the latter. However, severe pressure oscillation in hybrid rocket may result in a significant reduction in the performance of the propulsion system restricting the application of the technology. In this research, feed-system coupled instabilities were studied theoretically and experimentally for hybrid rocket engines. Two test campaigns were performed to investigate the effects of the precombustion chamber and oxidizer injector configurations on engine pressure oscillation. Then, an extended mathematical formulation (including the injector pressure drop, the precombustion chamber residence time, the gas residence time, and the combustion time lag) has been proposed. The investigation was based on a transfer function using the stability limit analysis and the root locus method. It has been found that the configuration of the precombustion chamber plays an important role in the nature of the feed-system coupled instabilities, and a correlation was proposed to predict the fundamental frequency based on the oxidizer precombustion chamber residence time. The work has shown that the precombustion chamber length and the oxidizer injection velocity are key parameters that affect the period of the pressure oscillations in hybrid engines subjected to feed-system coupled instabilities.