On the Adoption of Global/Local Approaches for the Thermomechanical Analysis and Design of Liquid Rocket Engines

Large Liquid Rocket Engines for Aerospace applications usually need to be cooled regeneratively since they are characterized by high pressure levels and heat flux with the presence, in the inner structure, of very high thermal gradients—thus necessitating the adoption of elastic-plastic nonlinear material models to study the thermomechanical behavior of the chamber and its service life. Tackling such nonlinearity makes the finite element analyses computationally intensive, particularly so when dealing with three-dimensional models. In these instances, it is highly recommended to adopt optimized numerical approaches that can save computation time while maintaining high levels of accuracy. The aim of the present paper is to implement an iterative coupling technique between two finite element models, a Global linear model and a Local nonlinear one, in the framework of a Global/Local procedure, to improve the accuracy of the numerical simulations. Both conformal and non-conformal meshes at the interface between the Global and the Local models have been considered. The results show that, even with a very few iterations, significant accuracy improvements are achieved.