Research database

The device of interest is a LOX-CH4 Liquid Rocket Engine (LRE) equipped with a pintle injector, regarded as a natural choice when the mission profile requires a large throttling range. The project aims at leveraging advanced mathematical techniques to generate a reliable multi-fidelity model, built upon both experimental and numerical high-fidelity data and capable of embedding the key physical features of the latter. The novelty of the project lies in a mathematically sound workflow to exploit all the available experimental data and systematically compensating for the lack of experiments by means of high-fidelity numerical modeling. The resulting augmented-fidelity model will embed the uncertainty on the parameters and, once validated, will be exploited to generate a low-fidelity Response Surface Model (RSM) to be employed in Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) Robust Design Optimization (DO). The results of the project have a strong translational impact on the entire aerospace propulsion and power generation industry.