Design, Analysis, and Simulation of Rocket Propulsion System

This document details the functionality of a software program used to streamline a rocket propulsion system design, analysis and simulation effort. The program aids in unifying the nozzle, chamber and injector portions of a rocket propulsion system design effort quickly and efficiently using a streamlined graphical user interface (GUI). The program also allows for the selection of common nozzle profiles including 80% rao, conical, a user selected percentage bell, and a minimum length nozzle (MLN) using method of characteristics (MOC). Chamber dimensions, propellant selections, and injector selection between doublet or triplet allow for further refinement of the desired rocket system design.;The program takes the available selections and specifications made by the user and outputs key design parameters calculated from the input variables. A 2-D graphical representation of the nozzle and/or chamber is plotted and coordinates of the plotted line are displayed. Additional design calculations are determined and displayed within the program such as specific impulse, exhaust velocity, propellant weight flow, fundamental instability frequencies, etc.;The rocket propulsion system design coordinates are saved to a *dat file which can be used in a CAD program to plot a 3-D model of the rocket propulsion system. The *dat file is compatible for creating splines in Unigraphics NX, Catia, and SolidWorks. Coordinates of the injectors are saved to a *dat file to be modeled in a CAD program as well. The program currently provides a symbolic link in the form of a button on the output page which will open Unigraphics NX CAD program.;The post-processing simulation of the rocket propulsion system is done in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program such as ANSYS ICEM CFD mesh generation software and ANSYS FLUENT CFD. The program provides a button on the output page which will open the ANSYS ICEM CFD mesh program and the ANSYS FLUENT CFD program. The user inputs the parasolid or IGES/STEP file of the CAD 3-D modeling of the rocket propulsion system into the ANSYS ICEM CFD meshing software. The geometry tolerant mesher program produces a volume or surface mesh to be read into the ANSYS FLUENT CFD software. Using ANSYS FLUENT CFD software, the user can choose to model the flow, turbulence, heat transfer, air flow over the rocket, combustion in the chamber, or various other options of the rocket propulsion system.;The rocket propulsion system is a graphical user interface (GUI) which is run through Matlab and is compatible for 2009-2011 Matlab versions.