Supersonic Retropropulsion CFD Analysis of a Reusable Vertical Landing Rocket: Student thesis: Master thesis (including HD thesis)

TY - RPRT

T1 - Supersonic Retropropulsion CFD Analysis of a Reusable Vertical Landing Rocket

T2 - Student thesis: Master thesis (including HD thesis)

AU - Rincón, Mario Javier

PY - 2018/6/1

Y1 - 2018/6/1

N2 - The future of rocket reusability and space democratisation currently relies on the effective use of Supersonic Retropropulsion (SRP) to return rocket stages to Earth. This thesis makes a specific study of compressible flows applied to a spacecraft's re-entry burn into Earth's atmosphere. Due to SRP complex flow structure, an accurate study is performed by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Furthermore, the potential of the open-source software OpenFOAM is tested and compared to the existing validation results from CFD and experimental SRP. Hence, the results of a CFD SRP simulation of a 60-degree sphere cone geometry, running a sweep of five different thrust values is performed. The results are matched and compared with the available experimental and computational studies available. It has been found that OpenFOAM by means of its solver rhoCentralFoam is capable to simulate the physics involving SRP. With a very inexpensive grid, flow structures and pressure field are captured with marginal accuracy, however, to enhance and fully validate its use for SRP applications, further research has to be performed due to the significant inaccuracies yielded in the pressure distribution.

AB - The future of rocket reusability and space democratisation currently relies on the effective use of Supersonic Retropropulsion (SRP) to return rocket stages to Earth. This thesis makes a specific study of compressible flows applied to a spacecraft's re-entry burn into Earth's atmosphere. Due to SRP complex flow structure, an accurate study is performed by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Furthermore, the potential of the open-source software OpenFOAM is tested and compared to the existing validation results from CFD and experimental SRP. Hence, the results of a CFD SRP simulation of a 60-degree sphere cone geometry, running a sweep of five different thrust values is performed. The results are matched and compared with the available experimental and computational studies available. It has been found that OpenFOAM by means of its solver rhoCentralFoam is capable to simulate the physics involving SRP. With a very inexpensive grid, flow structures and pressure field are captured with marginal accuracy, however, to enhance and fully validate its use for SRP applications, further research has to be performed due to the significant inaccuracies yielded in the pressure distribution.

KW - CFD

KW - fluid mechanics

KW - supersonic retropropulsion

KW - openfoam

KW - supersonic flow

KW - compressible flow

M3 - Report

BT - Supersonic Retropropulsion CFD Analysis of a Reusable Vertical Landing Rocket

PB - AALBORG UNIVERSITY , PROJECT LIBRARY

ER -