Mysterious Sound Waves Can Destroy Rockets

Ponca City, We love you writes "Scientists believe that powerful and unstable sound waves, created by energy supplied by the combustion process, were the cause of rocket failures in several US and Russian rockets. They have also observed these mysterious oscillations in other propulsion and power-generating systems such as missiles and gas turbines. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a liquid rocket engine simulator and imaging techniques to help demystify the cause of these explosive sound waves and bring scientists a little closer to being able to understand and prevent them. The team was able to clearly demonstrate that the phenomenon manifests itself in the form of spinning acoustic waves that gain destructive power as they rotate around the rocket's combustion chamber at a rate of 5,000 revolutions per second. Researchers developed a low-pressure combustor to simulate larger rocket engines then used a very-high-speed camera with fiber optic probes to observe the formation and behavior of excited spinning sound waves within the engine. 'This is a very troublesome phenomenon in rockets,' said Professor Ben Zinn. 'These spinning acoustic oscillations destroy engines without anyone fully understanding how these waves are formed. Visualizing this phenomenon brings us a step closer to understanding it.'"

Comments

Summary is a bit off

[evanbd]

The new result here isn't acoustic instabilities; those have been known for a long time. The interesting result is a new set of imaging techniques that give a better understanding of *why* they occur, rather than simply observing on pressure traces that they *do* occur. After a bit more research, this may turn into techniques to more reliably avoid them in the design stage, rather than having to go through various tweaks on the injector / combustion chamber to remove them should they appear.

This is very cool work. Of course, it's rocket science, not rocket engineering, so it's unlikely to impact new designs for several years yet.

Re:Summary is a bit off

[evanbd]

No, you're on the right track, but not quite there. Computational techniques are only barely able to simulate rocket chambers well; combustion dynamics are complex and not well understood. That's a large part of what makes this work interesting (the other part being the imaging techniques to actually photograph the waves).

The problem isn't actually the chamber or nozzle walls resonating, it's the acoustic cavity -- exactly analogous to an organ pipe. There are a variety of techniques used to de-tune the resonance modes. (It also happens in the chamber, not the nozzle -- gas in the expansion portion of the nozzle is locally supersonic, so sound can't propagate backwards, which means no resonance.) For example, the SSME has some of the injectors protruding further into the chamber than others, creating interruptions in the flat surface of the injector face. There exist other techniques, and some google searching will turn up some. Also, playing with the metals in the chamber wall is probably right out -- they're basically already decided by thermal considerations, and high performance engines almost universally use copper.

Historically, the design process has involved experienced engineers, rules of thumb, and lots of testing. Computer models will help, but they'll never really replace the "lots of testing" stage. At least for small engines (up to several thousand pounds of thrust), it's cheaper, easier, and more accurate to just build the thing.

Re:Summary is a bit off

[evanbd]

Titanium may melt at 1900K, but rocket chambers operate in the realm of 2500-3500K. They have to be cooled, and copper is the material of choice for the same reason it makes good CPU heat sinks -- excellent thermal conductivity. Some older thrust chambers were made of steel (WAC Corporal, iirc), and it works at low chamber pressures (less heat flux), but it doesn't work as well and there are corrosion issues in storage. As performance increases and chamber pressures rise, metals other than copper look less and less appealing.

Some nozzles are uncooled in the aft portion (as the gas expands and accelerates, it cools down, so the environment gets easier to handle). The Kestrel engine used in the Falcon 1 upper stage, for example, has a radiatively cooled Niobium nozzle. Titanium has been used, but Niobium and a few others tend to perform better in that environment -- the combination of hot reactive gases is hard to handle.

Somthing Wrong Here. was Re:Nothing new here

[FlyingGuy]

Ok, before parent gets any farther this has to be de-bunked. Sound waves did not destroy the bridge. A sound wave, in any medium consists of a compression and a rarifraction ., that is a leading pressure wave followed by a area of lower pressure that propagate in a known fashion. The intensity of a sound wave obeys the inverse square law.

What happened to the Tacoma Narrows Bride was caused be an error in aerodynamic calculations on the part of the design engineer. Air passing around the bridge deck acted exactly like air does when presented with a crude airfoil, it formed an area of low pressure leeward of the bridge deck and a low pressure area leeward and below the bridge deck. Th resulting high pressure and low pressure vectors imparted a twisting moment to the bridge deck.

The twisting moment was resisted by the torsional rigidity of the bridge deck. This caused the deck to twist to and build torsional tension. The twisting caused the aerodynamic profile of the bridge deck to change. The resulting change allowed the bridge deck to revert back to its original shape and aerodynamic profile, rinse and repeat. Thus the repeated twisting caused enough of the riveted and bolted joints to fail which led to a cascade failure as the remaining joints failed under the bridges weight and twisting motion.

This was not "low frequency sound waves" although the structures oscillations did cause some very low frequency sounds waves, it was destroyed by nothing more then bad aerodynamics.