Combustion Instabilities in Liquid Rock Engines: Testing and Development Practices in Russia

Prepared by the former director of research and development of the largest liquid rocket testing center in the world and edited by an array of American experts, this describes the technology captured by Russian and former Soviet Union researchers seeking to determine the required quantitative margin of operating process stability in liquid rocket engine (LRE) combustion chambers and gas generators. They describe hard and soft excitations in transitions, converting propellant to combustion products, testing at various stages of combustor development, and studying acoustics in combustion chamber stability, natural disturbances, artificial pressure disturbances, injector head elements, pressure oscillation decrements, pulsing liquid-liquid chambers, and gas-liquid chambers. They close by describing the stability characteristics of engines with adjustable injectors and the control of stability in the proton engine. Fully illustrated, this is a good study of theory as well as of the evaluation techniques the researchers developed. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)