Development and application of an integrated design system for cavitating inducer of cryogenic turbopumps

This thesis work focuses on the design of rocket engine inducers, developing an automatic and integrated procedure for the generation of parametric geometry that have improved performance in a multiphase environment. The research activity begins with the implementation of a full procedure for the geometric construction of inducer using a parametric programming software. The entire workflow for fluid-dynamic analysis of each created case is developed allowing an integrated system between CAD generation of the fluid domain, computational mesh and cavitation analysis setup. At the end of the design cycle, in order to ensure a technique of objective comparison between the cases generated, a new post-processing procedure is proposed with the aim of determining a new parameter called Cavitation Risk Index based on the location of the vapor cavities inside the flow passage. Two different sensitivity analysis on geometric variables have been studied for validate the automatic process. After, an improvement analysis has been studied with several inducers created by using the Sobol algorithm with eight geometric inputs in order to obtain an optimum-case with lower CRI compared to the reference case. The use of the inducer as a component for a turbopump dealing with the oxidizer required the assessment of the performance under cryogenic conditions. The research work concludes by implemented a revised cavitation model for the treatment of cryogenic fluids, obtaining the validation that the new inducer geometry represents improvements with both water and oxygen as a working fluid.