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A comprehensive solution for designing and optimizing student-built liquid rocket engines.

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LiquidEngineSizingTool

Welcome to the Liquid Engine Sizing Tool, a project aimed at creating a comprehensive engine design tool for liquid rocket engines. This tool provides a complete solution for sizing the combustion chamber, injector and nozzle geometry of your engine.

My goal with this project is not only to create a tool that can be useful for others, but also to learn more about the design of liquid rocket engines myself. By implementing this tool, I hope to gain deeper insights into the complex process of engine design.

Roadmap

This is a small roadmap of stuff I want to implement:

Phase 0: Design Selection

This is basically the phase before any calculations where you look into the requirements of the engine. This is stuff like selecting propellant, defining thrust level etc.

  • Implement a way to find the optimal O/F ratio for Isp for a propellant combination
  • Implement a way to find an appropriate value for the L*
  • Implement a way to find propellant combinations
  • Improve the L* availablility
  • Make a simple vehicle dynamics analyzer so you can find what Exit Pressure is most optimal for your engine
  • Maybe add some kind of tradeoff tool so you can make choices

Known values: T, Pe, Pa_design, O/F, L*, Fuel, Oxidizer

Phase 1: Preliminary Design

This phase involves the initial layout of the engine in such a way that all engine dimensions are known.

  • Implement initial sizing of engine characteristics

Known values: pressure ratio, mw, gamma, expansion ratio, combustion temperature, throat temperature, exit velocity, mass flow rate, Isp, throat area, exit area

  • Implement engine geometry
  • Implement various options for nozzles like bell and conical
  • Calculate engine volume
  • Calculate combustion chamber dimensions
  • Plot the engine geometry (WIP)

Phase 2: Initial analysis

This phase involves analysing the requirements of the subsystems of the engine like the cooling and injectors.

  • Simulate the heat flux through the engine
  • Find out cooling channel requirements
  • Simulate the injector requirements
  • Find pressure and thermal stresses on material

Phase 3: Initial Design

This phase involves coming up with an initial design from the initial analysis

  • Implement some kind of material selection method
  • Implement the ability for multiple materials (multi material printing)
  • Mass estimation for various materials
  • Allow for material trade-off
  • Allow for injector trade-off
  • Analyse combustion stability in the injector

Phase 4: Detail Analysis

  • Implement FEM methods to analyse stresses on materials
  • Simulate fluid flow through the injector
  • Simulate combustion instability
  • Simulate combustion chamber efficiencies

Phase 5: Detail Design

  • Allow for easy export to CAD software
  • Allow for export of heat fluxes for FEM

Phase 6: Validation

  • Allow for checking simulation with tested data
  • Allow for determining pressures/temperatures at certain positions so it can be compared to sensor data

Phase 7: Feed system simulation

  • Allow for more advanced feed system design simulations
  • Allow for basic tank requirements

Phase 8: Turbomachinery

  • Add turbomachinery design capabilities