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The development of modern reusable launchers, such as the Themis project with its LOX/LCH4 Prometheus engine, CALLISTO—a reusable VTVL-launcher first-stage demonstrator with a LOX/LH2 RSR2 engine, and SpaceX's Falcon 9 with its Merlin 1D engine, underscores the need for advanced control algorithms to ensure reliable engine operation. The multi-restart capability of these engines imposes additional requirements for throttling, necessitating an extended controller-validity domain to safely achieve low thrust levels across various operating regimes. This capability also increases the risk of component failure, especially as engine parameters evolve with mission profiles. To address this, our study evaluates the dynamic reliability of reusable rocket engines (RREs) and their subcomponents under different failure modes using multi-physics system-level modelling and simulation, with a particular focus on turbopump components. Transient condition modelling and performance analysis, conducted using EcosimPro-ESPSS software (version 6.4.34), revealed that turbopump components maintain high reliability under nominal conditions, with turbine blades demonstrating significant fatigue life even under varying thermal and mechanical loads. Additionally, the proposed predictive model estimates the remaining useful life of critical components, offering valuable insights for improving the longevity and reliability of turbopumps in reusable rocket engines. This study employs deterministic, thermally dependent structural simulations, with key control objectives including end-state tracking of combustion chamber pressure and mixture ratios and the verification of operational constraints, exemplified by the LUMEN demonstrator engine and the LE-5B-2 engine class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Safe shutdown of a liquid rocket engine in ground testing prior to the onset of damaging combustion instabilities through reliable detection of instability precursors would translate to time and cost savings in engine development programmes. Methods derived from statistical, recurrence, and fractal analysis have been successfully applied in the literature to detect precursors in unsteady pressure signals from canonical combustion experiments, gas-turbine combustion experiments, and sub-scale rocket combustion experiments operated at low pressures. In the present work, several such methods were applied to data from two cryogenic oxygen-natural gas rocket experiments operated at higher pressures than previously reported; both sub- and supercritical with respect to oxygen. The goal was to identify methods that can discern limit-cycle instabilities from intermittently unstable operation and are sufficiently responsive to be applied as emergency shut-down criteria in engine tests. Among the methods applied were the standard deviation, variance of the auto-correlation, the second spectral moment, the ratio between determinism and recurrence rate, the Hurst-exponent, and the multifractal range. The second spectral moment, the Hurst-exponent, and a measure derived from the multifractal spectrum all have short detection delays for instability onset and short-lived could be discerned from self-sustaining instabilities with an appropriate choice of threshold value. They also have moderate computation cost which makes them of interest for potential real-time implementation. The Hurst-exponent has the additional advantage of a common threshold value for all test cases addressed, demonstrating its potential for broader application independent of combustion device or operating conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hot fire tests were performed using a single-injector research combustor featuring a large optical access window (255 × 38 mm) for flame visualisation. Three test campaigns were conducted with the propellant combination of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, liquid oxygen and compressed-natural-gas, as well as liquid oxygen and liquefied-natural-gas at conditions relevant for main- and upper-stage rocket engines. The large optical access enabled synchronised flame imaging using ultraviolet and blue radiation wavelengths covering a large portion of the combustion chamber for various sets of sub- and supercritical operating conditions. Combined with temperature, pressure and unsteady pressure measurements, this data provides a high-quality basis for the validation of numerical modelling. Flame width, length and opening angle as features describing the flame topology were extracted from the imaging. The suitability of flame imaging using ultraviolet and blue radiation wavelengths as qualitative markers of heat release was evaluated. Two-dimensional distributions of the Rayleigh Index were calculated for intervals with and without high-amplitude, self-excited oscillations of the longitudinal acoustic resonance modes. The calculated Rayleigh Index values properly reflect the thermoacoustic state of the chamber, indicating that both types of imaging may be used for qualitative study of thermoacoustic coupling of high-pressure cryogenic flames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hot fire tests of a multi-injector research combustor were performed with liquid-oxygen and liquefied-natural-gas (LOX/LNG) propellants at chamber pressures from 30 up to 67 bar, hence at conditions similar to an upper stage rocket engine. Within these tests shear coaxial injectors were tested with and without a recessed LOX post. In both configurations, operating conditions with flames anchored at the LOX post tip and thus, if available, pre-combustion in the recess volume as well as lifted flames were observed. Flame anchoring was indirectly detected via acoustic measurements, using mean speed of sound to indicate the presence of flame in the head end of the combustion chamber. While the injector without recess showed only stable combustion irrespective of the flame anchoring behavior, the recessed injector featured short-lived bursts of oscillatory combustion and sustained combustion instabilities. Analysis of the test data showed that stable flame anchoring could not be ensured at momentum flux ratios below 20 for a non-recessed and below 45 for a recessed injector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]