Research on Structural Optimization for Regenerative-Cooling Thrust Chamber

A regenerative-cooling liquid rocket engine chamber is applied as the study object, and the heat transfer models are established to get the distributions of chamber parameters. A thermal-fatigue simulation is carried out go get the strain of the throat section with the thermal field and pressure field applied as the boundary conditions of a two-dimensional finite-element model. A usage factor is used for the life estimation of chamber, and the structural parameters of cooling channels are optimized aiming for a smallest usage factor which means a longest life. The influence of parameter changes is researched in this paper respectively. Three methods, linear search method, conjugate gradient method and gradient free method are respectively applied for the structural parametric optimization of cooling channels. The result of the research shows that the optimized structures have a longer life than the initial one has.