J Vis (2019) 22:773–781

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-019-00548-7

R E G UL A R P A P E R

Keonwoong Lee • Dongsoo Shin • Min Son • Heejang Moon • Jaye Koo

Flow visualization of cryogenic spray from a movable

pintle injector

Received: 19 November 2018 / Revised: 13 January 2019 / Accepted: 24 January 2019 / Published online: 30 April 2019
Ó The Visualization Society of Japan 2019

Abstract Pintle injector has the advantages of wide throttle-ability by sustaining high combustion effi-
ciency and weight lightening by replacing multi-injector elements with a single injector element. However,
compared to typical injectors with a fixed shape, like shear coaxial or coaxial swirl injector, there are many
complex variables owing to the moving parts. In this study, using cryogenic liquid nitrogen and gaseous
nitrogen as simulants, experiments on cryogenic nitrogen spray visualization were performed to simulate
cryogenic oxygen and gaseous methane combustion experiments. Experimental conditions were varied by
changing the pintle tip angle, pintle opening distance, and simulant supplying pressure. With the visual-
ization images, the spray angle of cryogenic spray was obtained and compared with the previous empirical
equations. The former empirical equation between total momentum ratio and spray angle is not well
matched, but the other equation between velocity ratio and spray angle fits well with experimental result,
through modification of parameter.

Keywords Pintle injector  Visualization image  Cryogenic spray

1 Introduction

Shear coaxial injector and coaxial swirl injector were used extensively for liquid rocket engines, in which
the shear coaxial injector is simple in design with more precision machining (Long et al. 2003). The coaxial
swirl injector was installed widely in Russian liquid rocket engines with kerosene as a liquid fuel (Sutton
2003) and exhibited a better combustion efficiency than the shear coaxial injector, but the design is quite
complicated.
Pintle injector is a kind of liquid rocket injector that controls the propellant velocities by moving pintle
part. It is used for wide throttle-ability by sustaining high combustion efficiency (Dressler and Bauer 2000).
Also, it has an advantage of a reduction in weight by replacing many injector elements to a single injector
element (Huzel and Huang 1992). Hence, pintle injector recently re-emerged for liquid rocket engines. On
the other hand, as compared with fixed shaped type of conventional injectors, designing the moving part is

K. Lee  D. Shin
Graduate School, Korea Aerospace University, Goyang, Republic of Korea

M. Son
Institute of Space Propulsion, DLR, Lampoldshausen, Germany

H. Moon  J. Koo (&)

School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Korea Aerospace University, 76 Hanggongdaehak-ro, Goyang 10540,
Republic of Korea
E-mail: [email protected]
Tel.: ?82-2-300-0116
774 K. Lee et al.

complex. Therefore, the fundamental research of the spray characteristics of the pintle injector is required to
perform the combustion study experimentally.
CH4 is currently adopted as a fuel for liquid rocket engines in Europe (Iannetti et al. 2017). LOx/CH4
propellant combination has advantages over LOx/kerosene combination, such as higher specific impulse and
cooking temperature of CH4. Recently, DLR has investigated experimentally and numerically using LOx/
GCH4 combination to adopt for Future Launchers Preparatory Program (Preuss et al. 2008). The pintle
injector using CH4 is employed in SpaceX Raptor engine (Kato et al. 2017).
Researchers have investigated experimentally the spray characteristics of pintle injector using water/air
or water/water as simulants (Son et al. 2015 and Cheng et al. 2017), and those results are insufficient to
predict the cryogenic spray characteristics. And also, the experiments were conducted at an atmospheric
condition. Therefore, it is not suitable to analyze the cryogenic spray behavior.
Research on cryogenic cold flow experiment using liquid nitrogen and gaseous nitrogen has been
performed with two-fluid atomizer (Ingebo 1993). The cryogenic experiment with pintle injector is not
sufficient. With the survey of the literature on the cryogenic experiments, the objective of the paper is to
study the cryogenic spray behavior of the pintle injector. As a preliminary study, the spray visualization is
conducted experimentally using cryogenic liquid nitrogen and gaseous nitrogen at the subcritical condition.
Consequently, the modified spray angle correlation is discussed in the literature.

2 Experimental apparatus and conditions

The cross-sectional view and dimensions of a pintle injector are shown in Fig. 1 and Table 1, and the
schematic of the cryogenic spray experimental apparatus is shown in Fig. 2. This apparatus was designed for
the combustion of liquid–gaseous propellants, such as the combination of liquid oxygen and gaseous
methane. The liquid propellant is injected through the center flow path, and the gaseous propellant is
injected through the annular gap. The flow rate of the liquid propellant is controlled by varying both the
supplying pressure and pintle opening distance, and that of the gaseous propellant is controlled by varying
the supplying pressure.

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Fig. 1 Schematic of pintle injector

Table 1 Dimensions of a pintle injector

Center post radius Rcp 4.0 mm

Center gap radius Rcg 2.25 mm
Pintle rod radius Rpr 1.5 mm
Pintle tip radius Rpt 4.0 mm
Annular gap thickness tann 0.5 mm
Post recess length Lr 3.0 mm
Pintle tip angle htip 0°, 20°, 40°
Opening distance Lop 0.3–0.8 mm
Flow visualization of cryogenic spray 775

Fig. 2 Schematic of cryogenic spray experimental apparatus

First, liquid nitrogen was filled into the reservoir and pressurized using gaseous helium. Bypassing of
liquid nitrogen was performed before the experiment for the cooling of the pipeline and injector.
To observe the difference by pintle tip angle, we used three different pintle tips with angles of 0°, 20°,
and 40°. The exit area of pintle nozzle must be determined for the calculation of liquid propellant injection
velocity. The exit area can be calculated as follows:
h i
Aliq ¼ p 2Lop Rcp cos htip  L2op sin htip cos h2tip ð1Þ

For the calculation of gaseous propellant injection velocity, the area of annular gap can be easily
calculated as follows:
h i
Agas ¼ p ðRcp þ tann Þ2  R2cp ð2Þ

In order to generalize the results, the total momentum ratio (TMR) was used as the non-dimensional
number, as shown in Eq. (3).
P
ðmVÞ
_ radial m_ liq Vliq cos htip
TMR ¼ P ¼ ð3Þ
_ axial m_ liq Vliq sin htip þ m_ gas Vgas
ðmVÞ
The shadowgraph method was used for spray image visualization. Spray images were captured using a
Photron APX-RS high-speed charge-coupled device (CCD) camera with the exposure time of 1 ls, frame
rate of 3000 fps, and resolution of 1024 9 1024. In order to analyze the spray image, an averaged image
was obtained from 100 instantaneous images for each test. More than 3000 images were obtained from each
experiment.

3 Experimental result

The experimental conditions are shown in Table 2. The temperature of gaseous nitrogen is constant at room
temperature. In these experiments, the supplying pressure of simulants and the pintle opening distance were
controlled.
The two representative images with pintle tip angle of 0° are illustrated in Fig. 3. Tests 1–1 and 1–4 were
performed under the same conditions of pintle tip angle and opening distance, but the gaseous nitrogen
supplying pressure was different. As the velocity of gaseous nitrogen increases, the spray angle decreased
due to the increased axial momentum as shown in Table 1. Reynolds number range of liquid nitrogen jet is
from 1.1 9 105 to 1.9 9 105, and that of gaseous nitrogen is from 6.0 9 104 to 1.1 9 105.
 776

Table 2 Experimental conditions

Pintle tip angle 0° 20° 40°

Test no. 1–1 1–2 1–3 1–4 1–5 1–6 2–1 2–2 2–3 2–4 2–5 3–1 3–2 3–3 3–4
Opening distance (mm) 0.4 0.5 0.8 0.4 0.5 0.8 0.3 0.5 0.3 0.4 0.8 0.3 0.5 0.8 0.5
Supplying pressure (bar)
LN2 15.0 15.0 15.0
GN2 15.0 25.0 15.0 20.0 15.0 25.0
m_ LN2 (g/s) 172.8 191.2 204.0 200.4 211.8 228.2 197.8 228.0 182.2 188.8 211.6 122.4 149.5 223.4 213.6
VLN2 (m/s) 26.0 22.4 15.3 30.2 25.5 17.2 38.2 27.5 42.0 32.5 16.1 30.8 22.9 21.8 32.4
TLN2 (K) 107.0 104.2 105.0 108.11 109.9 110.9 104.1 111.1 96.5 104.8 108.6 99.1 101.7 103.3 106.3
m_ GN2 (g/s) 21.4 22.8 22.4 26.7 29.6 31.2 12.4 12.3 15.8 16.8 16.1 22.1 18.5 16.2 29.6
VGN2 (m/s) 207.3 175.3 160.9 216.6 197.7 206.2 205.9 158.4 200.9 207.9 165.2 289.1 182.8 142.0 222.3
TMR 1.01 1.06 0.87 0.94 0.93 0.61 1.38 1.45 1.24 1.03 0.65 0.33 0.47 0.69 0.47
Spray angle (deg) 72.5 66.8 67.1 64.4 62.9 65.0 47.0 56.2 47.7 52.7 53.4 26.5 33.7 33.5 30.9
Chamber pressure (bar) 6.82 8.60 9.21 8.14 9.88 9.98 2.98 4.14 4.20 4.34 4.28 4.17 6.69 7.54 8.82
K. Lee et al.
Flow visualization of cryogenic spray 777

(a) test 1-1 (b) test 1-4

(θtip = 0°, Lop = 0.4 mm, Low GN2 flow rate) (θtip = 0°, Lop = 0.4 mm, High GN2 flow rate)

Fig. 3 Shadowgraph image (left) and averaged image (right) with 0° of pintle tip angle

(a) test 1-5 (b) test 3-4

(θtip = 0°, Lop = 0.5 mm, TMR = 0.93) (θtip = 40°, Lop = 0.5 mm, TMR = 0.47)

Fig. 4 Shadowgraph image (left) and averaged image (right) of similar mass flow rate, different pintle tip angle conditions

In Fig. 4, visualization images of tests 1–5 and 3–4 are shown. The mass flow rates and pintle tip
opening distance are almost same, but the pintle tip angle is different. By changing pintle tip angle, TMR is
changed drastically. From this, spray angle of test 1–5 is much larger than that of test 3–4. To observe the
effect of TMR without changing pintle tip angle, images with pintle tip angle of 20° are illustrated in Fig. 5.
Naturally, in same pintle tip angle condition, as TMR decreases, the spray angle also decreases.
Lastly, representative images with similar TMR condition are shown in Fig. 6. Comparing tests 1–6,
2–5, and 3–3, as the pintle tip angle increased, the spray angle of sprays was reduced. From this result, it can
be deduced that the spray angle is affected by pintle tip angle, not only by TMR.

4 Empirical correlations of spray angle

The spray angle was calculated from the averaged image. Since liquid nitrogen evaporates quickly at room
temperature, the spray angle is defined to the spray surface at five times of pintle opening distance from the
center post tip.
Several empirical equations about spray angle of pintle injector and TMR are suggested. Boettcher et al.
(2009) suggested an empirical equation of gas–gas pintle injector as Eq. (4).
1
cos hspray ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð4Þ
1 þ TMR2
Cheng et al. (2017) suggested an empirical equation of liquid–liquid pintle injector as Eq. (5).
1
cos hspray ¼ ð5Þ
1 þ TMR
Lastly, Park et al. (2018) also suggested empirical equation of liquid–gas pintle injector with 20° of tip
angle as Eq. (6).
778 K. Lee et al.

(a) test 2-2 (b) test 2-4 (c) test 2-5

(θtip = 20°, Lop = 0.5 mm, (θtip = 20°, Lop = 0.4 mm, (θtip = 20°, Lop = 0.8 mm,
TMR = 1.43) TMR = 1.03) TMR = 0.65)

Fig. 5 Shadowgraph images (top) and averaged images (bottom) with 20° of pintle tip angle

(a) test 1-6 (b) test 2-5 (c) test 3-3

(θtip = 0°, Lop = 0.8 mm, (θtip = 20°, Lop = 0.8 mm, (θtip = 40°, Lop = 0.8 mm,
TMR = 0.61) TMR = 0.65) TMR = 0.69)

Fig. 6 Shadowgraph images (top) and averaged images (bottom) with similar TMR
Flow visualization of cryogenic spray 779

Fig. 7 Comparison between different empirical equations and experimental result

 
1
hspray ¼ 90  1:05  ð6Þ
ð1 þ TMR0:75 Þ
However, each equation has some limitations. Equations (4) and (5) are for only gas–gas and liquid–
liquid experiments, respectively. And these three equations do not consider about pintle tip angle.
The graph between spray half-angle and TMR is illustrated in Fig. 7. Equations (4) and (5) are not
matched with experimental result, and Eq. (6) is only matched with 20° of pintle tip angle case.
In analysis of the visualization images, it is shown that the pintle tip angle also affects the spray angle.
Therefore, the variable of pintle tip angle is required as a parameter in the empirical equation. One of the
empirical equations between TMR and spray angle that contains pintle tip effect is suggested by Son (2017),
as follows:
 
3 1
hspray ¼ n  1 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð7Þ
2 1 þ TMR
90h
where n ¼ 90 tip
Figure 8 compares experimental spray half-angle and estimated spray half-angle of Eq. (7). The esti-
mated spray angle well tracks the measured values more than former three Eqs. (4), (5) and (6), but the
variance seems large.
The other empirical equation is suggested by Son et al. (2017). This equation is derived with velocity
ratio and pintle tip opening distance, as follows:
 
S  0:2
hspray ¼ 90  n  exp  S ð8Þ
1 þ ðK=90Þp
90h
where n ¼ 90 tip , S ¼ 1:15 þ 1:35n, and p ¼ 1:30 þ 0:90n
In this equation, K is the most important parameter. K is defined as follows:
Vgas tann
K¼ ð9Þ
Vliq Lopen
However, this empirical correlation has a limitation. The water/air experiments were conducted under
atmospheric conditions. Therefore, there was no consideration of the density change of propellants owing to
the chamber pressure. Moreover, the density changes of liquid propellant were also not considered.
Consequently, new parameters are required to account for the change of density.
Using dimensional analysis, the physical meaning of parameter K can be expressed as follows:
!1=2
1=2 2
Vgas tann Vgas Agas Vgas Agas
K¼  1=2
 2 A
ð10Þ
Vliq Lopen Vliq A Vliq liq
liq
780 K. Lee et al.

Fig. 8 Comparison of the measured spray angle and estimated spray angle

1=2 1=2
where tann  Agas and Lopen  Aliq
Further, the momentum ratio of propellants is expressed as follows:
2
m_ gas Vgas qgas Vgas Agas
M¼ ¼ 2
ð11Þ
m_ liq Vliq qliq Vliq Aliq

Therefore, the parameter K can be expressed as the ratio of the momentum divided by the density of each
propellant.
Thus, the parameter K can be modified as follows:
  1=2
qgas qair@atm Vgas tann
K¼   1=2 ð12Þ
qliq qwater Vliq Lopen
Through this process, the effects of density change of propellant can be considered. In the case of water/
air experiments under atmospheric conditions, the value of parameter K will not change.
As shown in Fig. 8, the estimated spray angle reasonably tracks the measured values. The result of a
previous study shown in Fig. 9 is water/air experiments under atmospheric conditions, and the others are the
result of LN2/GN2 spray experiments.

5 Conclusions

Using LN2 and GN2 as simulants, cryogenic spray experiments in high pressure chamber were conducted
with a high-speed CCD camera. The camera trigger signal and data acquisition system were synchronized to
investigate the effects of propellant density change.
Experimental conditions were determined by pintle tip angle, pintle opening distance, and simulant
supplying pressure. In the analysis of the visualization image, as TMR is increased, spray angle is also
increased. However, in similar TMR condition, if the pintle tip angle is changed, spray angle is also
changed. With this result, it can be deduced that not only the TMR but also the pintle tip angle affects the
spray half-angle.
Furthermore, the spray angles of cryogenic spray experiments were compared with other empirical
equations between spray angle and TMR. As shown in visualization image analysis, equations without
considering pintle tip effect did not fit well with experimental result. However, an equation that considers
about pintle tip angle was fit well, though variance seems large.
In addition, an empirical correlation between the spray angle and injection velocity was compared. In
Eq. (8), there is a limitation in that the correlation does not consider the density change of the fluids.
Flow visualization of cryogenic spray 781

Fig. 9 Comparison of the measured spray angle and estimated spray angle

Therefore, a modified parameter was suggested. The modified empirical equation is fit well more than the
other equations. Since this equation contains consideration about propellant density, geometric parameter,
and injection velocity change, this result could be useful in future research about combustion experiment
using pintle injector.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by Advanced Research Center Program (NRF-2013R1A5A1073861) through
the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIP) contracted through
Advanced Space Propulsion Research Center at Seoul National University.

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