Experimental and numerical investigation of an axisymmetric divergent dual throat nozzle

Abstract

The dual throat nozzle achieves higher thrust vectoring efficiencies and lesser thrust loss than other fluidic thrust-vectoring nozzles. Separation always occurs at the bottom of the cavity with complex three-dimensional characteristics for the dual throat nozzle. In this paper, by comparing the flow structure, nozzle surface static pressure distributions and skin friction lines, which are obtained by numerical simulations and wind tunnel experiments, an axisymmetric divergent dual throat nozzle is investigated in detail. The main results show the following findings. (1) The experimental schlieren photographs confirm again that the divergent nozzle configuration has the starting problem from an intuitive perspective. Meanwhile, the flow structure and nozzle surface static pressure distributions obtained by numerical simulations are consistent with the experimental results, except for the low nozzle pressure ratios. (2) The circumferential pressure difference is negligible upstream of the separation line but obvious downstream of the separation line. The skin friction lines and nozzle surface static pressure distributions of different circumferential angles obtained by experiments both prove that the actual flow in the axisymmetric divergent dual throat nozzle indeed possesses three-dimensional characteristics. Therefore, it is necessary to utilize the full three-dimensional computational domain to study the complex three-dimensional characteristics of the flow for the axisymmetric divergent dual throat nozzle thoroughly.