Work on liquid rocket engine combustion instabilities began in the early 1940s (Culick and Yang 1995). One of the most critical concepts in liquid rocket combustion instability, that of time lag (as a coordinating factor in influencing organized oscillations in liquid rocket combustion chambers) originated around this time in von Kármán‟s group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory around 1941 (cf. Summerfield 1951) shortly after oscillations were observed in early tests in liquid rocket engines in the United States. The essential idea was that there existed a finite time delay when an element of propellant entered the combustor and when heat was released from it. This delay controlled the phasing between heat release and pressure oscillations thereby making the system stable or unstable as per Rayleigh‟s criteria. In the years that followed, this model was applied to various studies involving combustion instability in liquid rocket engines. Gunder and Friant (1950), Yachter (1951) and Summerfield (1951) analyzed low frequency chugging instability arising from the interaction between feed system and combustion process using a constant time lag model. Crocco (1951;1952) introduced the time varying combustion time lag and used it to analyze high frequency instability. Total time lag was separated into two parts : a constant (insensitive) time lag and a time varying (sensitive) time lag that responded to fluctuations in the chamber conditions and the idea of the „interaction index‟ was introduced. Crocco (1951) first applied the sensitive time lag theory to longitudinal oscillations.

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