Design Methodology for the Performance, Weight, and Economic Assessment of Chemical Rocket Engines
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 30, Issue 1
Abstract
A design methodology is presented that supports the design of future aerospace rocket-powered vehicles. In particular, it provides the capabilities to rapidly evaluate the performance, weight, size, and lifecycle costs of all chemical rocket engines at a conceptual level. By leveraging cycle-based approaches and surrogate modeling techniques, the performance of all chemical rocket engines can be evaluated with an accuracy of 3%, whereas it divides the execution time by a factor of compared to current physics-based models. New mass-estimating relationships are developed for estimating the weight and the size of solid engines with an improved accuracy compared to existing models. Physics-based models built around the key design drivers are used for the weight and size estimation of liquid and hybrid engines. Although existing cost-estimating relationships are used to evaluate the lifecycle costs of solid and liquid engines, a more physics-based model is developed for hybrid engines. Although it supports complex multiobjective optimizations and rapid trade-off analyses, this environment is also the first of its sort able to estimate the lifecycle costs of hybrid rocket engines.
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Information
Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 30 • Issue 1 • January 2017
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 23, 2015
Accepted: May 5, 2016
Published online: Jul 21, 2016
Discussion open until: Dec 21, 2016
Published in print: Jan 1, 2017
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