Experimental Study on Unsteady Cavitating Flow and Its Instability in Liquid Rocket Engine Inducer
, Desheng Zhang 1,* and Weibin Zhang 2
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript presents an experimental study of the unsteady cavitating flow through an inducer.
Specifically, the analysis presents its external characteristic performance and cavitation behavior, giving great attention to the unsteady pressure measurements and to the high-speed imaging. I believe the research subject is interesting for the readers, and I recommend its publication after some minor revisions.
I appreciated the description and interpretation of the obtained results.
I suggest better detailing the first part about the experimental setup and methodology to help the reader understanding the conducted experiments.
Some typos are present in the article, and some sentences appear not easy to read. Therefore, I recommend performing thorough proofreading to avoid these minor errors.
A few more specific suggestions and comments are provided as follows:
- Lines 53-60: these lines state the work done by ref.s 18,19,20. It could be useful if the authors could specify the main findings of these works to clarify the current state of the art.
- Line 63: “This study could be potentially used as a reference for the cavitating flow in the rocket engine inducer”. Could the authors give more details about that and specify the reason?
- Line 95: Section “Experimental methods”: The ‘test matrix’ is somewhat unclear to me. Could the authors provide information about the range of flow rate and pressure considered? The authors could consider adding a test matrix summarizing the main parameters for each set of experiments.
- Eq 1: Could the authors specify the terms p and Ul?
- Line 234: “ …P4 is always 3 times the shaft frequency, that is, the blade passage frequency, which is the passage frequency of the blade” Please, check this sentence since it appears unclear to me.
- Line 305: “measuring point P6 is 3 times the shaft frequency” Do the authors refer to P4?
- Figure 11: Could the authors specify in the caption what are the four NPSHa conditions?
- Figure 12: Please, specify the different flow rates in the caption
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Good job. Just provide some more sensitivity analysis and robustness of your method.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Introduction must be impoved. State of the art must be extended. Few references are reported.
The aim of the study must be more specified. In addtion, results description must be checked because of some inconsistences ( for example increasing or decreasing of curves are described in a wrong way, see for example line 142 for figure 6). Figures are not well readable. Please improve quality of figures.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
