[perozdero]

Hi everyone. For my university thesis I need to design a cold gas micro-thruster in the 1 - 10 mN. Using Matlab and conventional rocket theory I have done initial designs and now I would like to also make CFD simulations and see what difference I should expect in the performance of the engine. The reason why I want to do this is that at this thrust levels and nozzle sizes boundary conditions and wall roughness play significant role in the performance of the thruser.

With that in mind I would like to ask for our recommendations of which program and model parameters would be best for this. My university has Ansys Fluent / CFX and OpenFOAM. Now I am a beginner and have had only limited experience with Fluent so any help is welcome and highly appreciated.


Ideally I would like to set up the problem as follows:

Define a Tank Fluid Region with the gas initial properties such as pressure, temperature, mass etc, have some simple canal that can also be used to heat up the gass and the nozzle geometry. At the end I would like to see the variance of mass-flow, exhaust velocity, Mach Number etc. as the amount of gas reduces in the tank.

Some guidelines on how to accomplish all this or where to look for more information ( books, tutorials etc.) would be great. I have done few of the Fluent Tutorials which I think are relevant to my problem

Thanks