Modeling supersonic kerosene jet with real gas effect

Modern high performance rocket combustion engines run at high pressures while the propellants are injected at very low temperatures.Under these conditions, deviations from ideal gas assumption occur.In this work, a computationally cheap method for modeling non-reacting supersonic kerosene jet with real gas effects is investigated. This is achieved by using 2-D axi-symmetric Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) approach with a single component surrogate for real gas and ideal gas. Two cases were investigated i.e. one with real gas effect using Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK) equation of state (EoS) and the other using ideal gas assumption. The results are compared with existing literature based on 3-D Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with principle of Extended Corresponding States (ECS) accounting the real gas behavior and kerosene modeled by a three component surrogate. All the computations were performed corresponding to a fixed Nozzle Pressure Ratio (NPR) of 20 using ANSYS FLUENT. The results show that axi-symmetric RANS model with single component surrogate reproduces well the qualitative trend. However, the variation of flow properties observed between the ideal gas and real gas models were not significant.