Overview of Combustion Instabilities in Liquid-Propellant Rocket Engines

C OMBUSTION instabilities were discovered in solid- and liquid-propellant rocket engines at about the same time in the late 1930s. Since then, unsta-ble oscillations have occurred in most, if not practically all, new development programs. Indeed, because of the high density of energy release in a volume hav-ing relatively low losses, conditions normally favor excitation and sustenance o