ASTRO| Breakthrough

Breakthrough

Faster-than-light travel is the key to humanity’s dreams of inter-galactic space travel. Your challenge is to create an app, tool, game, or other interactive application that showcases both existing, as well as next generation/theoretical, breakthrough spacecraft propulsion in an engaging way.

THE SPIKER-BELL NOZZLE

Summary

A simplified and optimization design to produce a higher thrust by mounting a conventional bell nozzle to an aerospike nozzle which results in our design of a spiker-bell nozzle. By this design, the problems related to variation in back pressure can overcome by allowing the atmospheric pressure to control the flow surrounding the spike. At lower altitude, unlike the aerospike nozzle which uses the exhaust re-circulation at the base zone, the spiker-bell nozzle, uses the exhaust from bell nozzle to overcome the drag and also adds thrust to the vehicle. From theoretical analysis, it is observed, our design would produce higher thrust compared to bell nozzle and aerospike nozzle.

How We Addressed This Challenge
  • We developed a theoretical model of a conventional bell nozzle mounted onto an aerospike nozzle and our design will also reduce the need of highly complicated cooling technique, which is considered to be the greatest disadvantage of the aerospike nozzle by lowering the contact of the surface area to the hot flow of exhaust gases.
  • Our design is important because it can produce a higher thrust when compared to an aerospike nozzle and a conventional bell nozzle.
  • Through our design we will be able to carry payload in one single stage without multiple stages for different missions.
  • In place of producing a 2% pressure thrust in a normal aerospike nozzle engine under the region of it's base, our model is designed to produce a pressure thrust greater than 2%, as our model in base region contains a bell nozzle engine which can possibly contribute to produce 30-40% of pressure thrust.
  • This design can also increase thrust, maintain efficiency at varied altitudes which will save fuel. The combustion chambers are small, easier to develop, less expensive thrusters that give the engine greater versatility. Our design also eliminates the need for the heavy gimbals and actuators used to vary the direction of traditional nozzles due to the usage of differential thrust vectoring. Our design also has less risk of failure. All these reasons sum up to make our design, a time and cost effective choice for single staged missions.
How We Developed This Project
  • We come from a place where the development of sophisticated propulsive engines has just begun to emerge. Our curiosity to explore this area of propulsion got us into choosing our challenge, which is a new concept to the world.
  • We referred articles, research journals and publications related to the development of the conventional bell nozzle engine as well as an aerospike nozzle engine. We decided to make an approach to our idea by combining both the nozzle engines so as to improve the parameters required for a good flight experience.
  • We have developed an outline of how the execution of our design could come to existence by using SOLIDWORKS to develop the presumable model.
  • Theoretically, our design holds good for real time application provided technical support and monetary funds are made available to us. We faced technical issues in generating results for fluid flow analysis due to the unavailability of required software to understand the temperature and pressure parameters.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Based on the literature survey carried out on the different research papers, we designed and optimized the spiker-bell nozzle design. The research papers we used are listed below:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20000031654 - This deals with the basics of a parametric model of aerospike nozzle engine.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19970014941 - This paper deals with Multidisciplinary Approach to Aerospike Nozzle Design.

Project Demo
Data & Resources

http://www.aerorocket.com/MOC/MOC.html - The basic outline design measurements was taken under this website under the section "Aerospike Validation-2"

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/lasre_engine.jpg - This is the source of the image used in the ppt slide.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Luis_Bravo4/publication/328076078/figure/fig1/AS:678038220070923@1538668317392/Aerospike-Nozzle-Concept-Compared-to-a-Conventional-Bell-Nozzle.png - Studying this research paper we analyzed the exhaust flow of the aerospike nozzle and bell nozzle.

Tags
#Rocket propulsion #Bell nozzle engine #aerospike nozzle engine #Plug Contour #Thrust Characteristics #Performance
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.