Watson, Stuart Antony (2016) Design of an effective cooling system to enable the development of a low-cost rocket engine. (MSc(R) thesis), Kingston University, .

Abstract

Combustion within rocket engines produces a harsh environment, where chambers experience conditions such as oxidation, creep, pressure differences, stress, differences in expansion coefficients and thermal shocks. Therefore, development costs are significant as manufacturers are required to develop and use complex cooling systems and exotic materials. Rocket engine designers use CFD pacakage to predict the heat transfer within an engine, so that suitable materials and cooling methods can be selected. However, large time investment is required to set up the simulation to produce reliable and predictable results. A simple model has been developed using one-dimensional transient heat equations, applied using numerical methods to understand whether it is possible to produce accurate and reliable termal data whilst being scalable to enable the design of a low-cost cooled bi-propellant liquid rocket engine for different thrust levels. The results of the simulation were compared to both an analytical model to give a first order approximation to correlate to the expected thermal profiles and steady-state resutls produced by Rocket Propulsion Analysis (RPA). Although initially empirical data was to be used to compare with simulated results, time constraints led to limited production of data.

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