Welcome to the Liquid Engine Sizing Tool, a project aimed at creating a comprehensive engine design tool for liquid rocket engines. This tool provides a complete solution for sizing the combustion chamber, injector and nozzle geometry of your engine.
My goal with this project is not only to create a tool that can be useful for others, but also to learn more about the design of liquid rocket engines myself. By implementing this tool, I hope to gain deeper insights into the complex process of engine design.
This is a small roadmap of stuff I want to implement:
Phase 0: Design Selection
This is basically the phase before any calculations where you look into the requirements of the engine. This is stuff like selecting propellant, defining thrust level etc.
- Implement a way to find the optimal O/F ratio for Isp for a propellant combination
- Implement a way to find an appropriate value for the L*
- Implement a way to find propellant combinations
- Improve the L* availablility
- Make a simple vehicle dynamics analyzer so you can find what Exit Pressure is most optimal for your engine
- Maybe add some kind of tradeoff tool so you can make choices
Known values: T, Pe, Pa_design, O/F, L*, Fuel, Oxidizer
Phase 1: Preliminary Design
This phase involves the initial layout of the engine in such a way that all engine dimensions are known.
- Implement initial sizing of engine characteristics
Known values: pressure ratio, mw, gamma, expansion ratio, combustion temperature, throat temperature, exit velocity, mass flow rate, Isp, throat area, exit area
- Implement engine geometry
- Implement various options for nozzles like bell and conical
- Calculate engine volume
- Calculate combustion chamber dimensions
- Plot the engine geometry (WIP)
Phase 2: Initial analysis
This phase involves analysing the requirements of the subsystems of the engine like the cooling and injectors.
- Simulate the heat flux through the engine
- Find out cooling channel requirements
- Simulate the injector requirements
- Find pressure and thermal stresses on material
Phase 3: Initial Design
This phase involves coming up with an initial design from the initial analysis
- Implement some kind of material selection method
- Implement the ability for multiple materials (multi material printing)
- Mass estimation for various materials
- Allow for material trade-off
- Allow for injector trade-off
- Analyse combustion stability in the injector
Phase 4: Detail Analysis
- Implement FEM methods to analyse stresses on materials
- Simulate fluid flow through the injector
- Simulate combustion instability
- Simulate combustion chamber efficiencies
Phase 5: Detail Design
- Allow for easy export to CAD software
- Allow for export of heat fluxes for FEM
Phase 6: Validation
- Allow for checking simulation with tested data
- Allow for determining pressures/temperatures at certain positions so it can be compared to sensor data
Phase 7: Feed system simulation
- Allow for more advanced feed system design simulations
- Allow for basic tank requirements
Phase 8: Turbomachinery
- Add turbomachinery design capabilities