Flow Field Characteristics of an Aerospike Nozzle Using Different Turbulence Models

Abstract

To improve the calculation of the flow properties of an aerospike nozzle, different turbulence models were investigated in this study. The primary shape of the nozzle plug is determined through utilizing an approximate method. The flow field is, then, simulated using the Navier-Stokes equations for compressible flows. The commercial computational fluid dynamics code Fluent is used to simulate the flow around an aerospike nozzle. The computational methodology employs steady state density-based formulation and a finite volume cell centered scheme to discretize the flow field equations. To accelerate the solution convergence, the flow field is divided into several zones in order to facilitate each zone with proper unstructured grid and also to offer the appropriate initial conditions for each zone. The accuracy and the robustness of wall function based turbulence schemes, i.e. k-e model, are compared with those of Spalart-Allmaras (S-A) and k-? turbulence models.