New algorithm for burning surface calculation of solid rocket motor with complicated grain based on level set method

We apply level set method to create a new burning surface calculation algorithm, viewing burning surface as interface of different materials. New algorithm attains burning surface variation regulation of arbitrary configuration grain by tracing grain burning surface recession. Our explanation centers around three topics: (1) calculation of burning surface area of complicated 3D grain; (2) calculation of burning surface area of grain with flaw; (3) calculation of burning surface area of grain with changing burning rate. We use explicit weighted essentially nonoscillatory (WENO) discretization scheme and total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta scheme in numerical simulation. Our numerical simulation uses grains of assumed configurations, not grains used in actual SRM (solid rocket motor). Simulation results show preliminarily that this new method has high calculation precision and good adaptability. This paper can be used to couple grain burning surface recession process to the numerical simulation of SRM chamber flow field.