Experimental and Numerical Analysis of the Intermittentency in a Nozzle Overexpanded-Flow

TL;DR

This study combines experimental and numerical methods to analyze the intermittent pressure fluctuations in over-expanded rocket nozzles, revealing scale-dependent bursts that follow a universal log-normal distribution, which could inform stochastic load models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of wall-pressure intermittency in over-expanded nozzles using wavelet-based statistics, highlighting universal behaviors and potential for stochastic modeling.

Findings

Intermittent bursts dominate wall-pressure fluctuations.

Intermittency is scale-dependent and observed around side-load frequencies.

Event statistics follow a universal log-normal distribution.

Abstract

The present work reports an investigation into the statistical properties of wall-pressure fluctuations in a highly over-expanded nozzle flow, characterized by significant shock-induced flow separation. This regime is extremely hazardous to rocket nozzles, as it leads to very high off-axis loads. The database under investigation has been obtained both experimentally and numerically by means of a hybrid RANS/LES simulation of the flow issuing from a sub-scale Truncated Ideal Contour (TIC) nozzle, fed with cold air and operating at a Reynolds number on the order of 10^6. The experimental campaign was conducted in the S150 supersonic wind tunnel at the Institut PPRIME in Poitiers. The degree of over-expansion is quantified by the nozzle pressure ratio (NPR). Pressure fluctuations are extracted from several probes positioned along the nozzle wall, considering different NPR values. The intermittent behavior is investigated using conditional statistics based on the wavelet transform, which demonstrates that the aerodynamic loads of the over-expanded jet consist of intermittent bursts rather than continuous variations. The wavelet analysis reveals scale-by-scale intermittency and, in particular, shows that the wall-pressure signals exhibit a significant degree of intermittency around the frequency associated with aerodynamic side-loads. The statistics of these intermittent events, in terms of the time delay between occurrences and in terms of their amplitude, are found to be weakly sensitive to NPRs and to locations along the nozzle wall and appear to follow a universal behaviour that can be modelled by a log-normal distribution. This finding may support the development of a stochastic model of the aerodynamic side-loads.