Performance comparison of three chemical precooled turbine engine cycles using methanol and n-decane as the precooling fuels

Precooled turbine engines are promising power for next generation in- and trans-atmospheric vehicles. A novel chemical precooling technology was proposed in our previous paper to reduce the fuel consumption by improving the chemical heat sink of fuels. However, the appropriate configuration design for chemical precooled engine cycle has not been revealed. This paper proposed an overall-view analysis method to distinguish the effects of different configurations/parameters on the engine performance, from which the configuration could be parameterized via a unified thermodynamic model. To improve the simulation precision of this model, the heat sink of fuel was measured by test. Through calculation, the results indicated that the utilization of working ability of the heated fuel was an effective way to improve the engine performances, and the cycle adopting both rocket turbine and gas turbine could increase the highest flight Mach number by 7.06%. Besides, the optimal engine performance could be obtained when the equivalence ratio was equal to 1.0. Moreover, the engine performance was more sensitive to air side pressure recovery coefficient of pre-cooler at smaller pressure ratio range; while for the larger pressure ratio, the efficiency of air compressor was the dominant factor.