A master thesis from Aalborg University
Supersonic Retropropulsion CFD Analysis of a Reusable Vertical Landing Rocket
Author(s)
Term
4. term
Education
Publication year
2018
Submitted on
2018-06-01
Pages
81 pages
Abstract
The future of rocket reusability and space democratisation currently relies in 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$^{\circ}$ 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 \textit{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.
Keywords
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