Honors College Theses

Publication Date

2024

Major

Mechanical Engineering (B.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Faculty Mentor

Dr. Marcel Ilie

Abstract

Renewed interest in manned spaceflight, mostly spurred by the advancement of commercial spacecraft, has led to growing interest in improving the efficiency of rocket engines. Aerospike nozzles have the potential to provide this boost in efficiency to spacecraft and thus lower costs and increase payload capacity. This type of nozzle is what is known as altitude adjusting and can significantly increase efficiency. When paired with propellants such as methane/oxygen, which can be manufactured in-situ on some planetary bodies and has a higher density than traditional propellants like liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, even more efficiency gain can be achieved. To understand the capabilities and drawbacks of aerospike nozzles, it is important to model their performance. To this end a comparison of the performance of a linear aerospike fueled with methane/oxygen and hydrogen/oxygen propellants was performed using computational fluid dynamics.

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