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CFD of an open sourced ultracentrifugal rocket engine? |
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August 12, 2023, 10:57 |
CFD of an open sourced ultracentrifugal rocket engine?
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James bowery
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 4
Rep Power: 17 |
In the mid 90's I was using TK!Solver to do calculations for an ultracentrifugal rocket engine for which Roger Gregory and I received a patent. The calculations were obviously not going to be nearly as adequate as they would be using CFD simulations today and the patent fees sucked the life out of the project about the time the DotCon bubble burst. That put a stop to our work.
But given:
I figured maybe an open source engineering project might be worth a shot. Has anyone experience with something along these lines and if so how should I proceed? Here's a look at the engine -- and before you say it's insane, read to the end. Some things are not obvious (ie: one of the characteristics of patentability). This is a side view of Fig. 1 in the patent, LOX inlet on left, LPG inlet hidden on opposite side: sidephoto.jpg sidediagram.png Azure is LOX Green is LPG Orange is combustion Gray is co-rotating aluminum structure 26 are the injectors 16 are CuW de Laval nozzle inserts are dotted outline (embedded in the aluminum) The inlet boundary conditions set on the left of the aluminum structure would be for LOX and LPG. The outlet boundary conditions set on the right would exit de Laval expansion into vacuum. The combustion chamber (orange) heat input would, at first, be equivalent to combustion at the outer circumference, or (later) from full-on combustion simulation. Outlet view equivalent to Fig 3. bottomphoto.jpg 64 are de Laval nozzles, canted to provide torque to the centrifugal pump. bottomdiagram.jpg One non-obvious aspect of this design is the way heat transfers from the combustion chamber to the "unreasonably" low number of cooling channels that double as impellers: The enormous g-forces and Coriolis forces in the impellers increase the liquid velocities at vastly higher rates than 1D flow thermal transfer would indicate. That plus the fact that aluminum has a very high thermal conductivity yielded surprisingly few cooling channels. However, there is no particular reason the number of cooling channels can't be increased. Other problematic (or non-obvious) aspects are:
We had a few prototypes fabricated in an automotive machine shop by a guy who designed and fabricated custom equipment for silicon fabs. Texas A&M ran dry rotational stability tests on one of them. |
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angular momentum, centrifugal pump, combustion, de laval nozzle, turbines |
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