Numerical simulation of the infrared radiative signatures of liquid and solid rocket plumes

In this paper, a finite volume method was developed to compute the infrared radiative signatures of both liquid and solid rocket plumes, and to investigate the radiative signatures on two wavebands, 2–6 and 8–12 μm bands, respectively. This method is based on the radiative transport equation for local thermodynamic equilibrium, which accounts for radiative heat transfer in inhomogeneous emitting, absorbing, and non-isotropic scattering media. The radiative properties of combustion gases are computed by using the Elsasser narrow band model, and that of particles are computed by using the Mie scattering theory. A numerical method is applied to solve the following three problems. The first one is the computation of the radiative heat transfer in an absorbing, emitting and isotropic scattering homogeneous cylindrical medium in which the radiative flux is presented. The other two are the computations of the infrared radiation of plumes from the liquid and solid rockets in which both the source and apparent radiant intensities are presented as results. The atmospheric absorption effect on the radiation of plumes is also considered by calculating the atmospheric transmittance using MODTRAN. Some of these results, compared with those available in the literature, have shown satisfactory agreement in most cases.