National Aerospace Laboratory Rocket Propulsion Research Division
National Aerospace Laboratory Rocket Propulsion Research Division
National Space Development Agency of Japan
The LOX (Liquid OXygen) and LH2 (Liquid Hydrogen) pumps of the LE-7 rocket engine are characterized by high delivery pressure and a large flow rate. The hydrodynamic performance of these pumps was thermodynamically evaluated. The performance of the LOX pump was expressed by the adiabatic head and efficiency, because LOX is not particularly compressible. However, the efficiency directly determined using the measured pressures and temperatures was corrected to approximate the true efficiency because there was internal leakage from the split pump to the main pump. For evaluation of the LH2 pump performance, the polytropic head and efficiency were used, because LH2 shows much greater compressibility than LOX. Comparison of the calculalions and test results confirmed that they better approximated the true head and efficiency than the adiabatic head and efficiency. The efficiency of both pumps was fairly high compared with that of large rocket pumps which have been developed to date.
Performance evaluation of LE-7 high pressure pumps
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