NUMERICAL PROPULSION LAB

The Numerical Propulsion Lab has a long standing experience in all the various theoretical and numerical analysis tools which guide the design process of rocket engines employing liquid, solid or hybrid propellants.

Such engines/motors are complex systems composed of numerous subsystems each with its own peculiar range of physical phenomena characterizing it, from gasdynamics phenomena, aero-acoustic phenomena, combustion of liquid or solid fuels, multi-phase flow effects, to heat exchange to surface erosion to turbulence and real gas effects. When the propulsion system is viewed as an integrated system, multidisciplinary approaches are generally used in order to analyze the interaction of each subsystem. 

A wide choice of numerical tools are employed in the Propulsion Lab, including in-house and commercial/open-source computational fluid dynamics codes, both for compressible steady/unsteady and low-Mach number reactive flows, even in complex geometries, which are selectively specialized and enriched with sub-models depending on the particular problem. The following is a list of topics currently being investigated in the Numerical Propulsion Lab:

- Cooling channel flows in liquid rocket engines

- Combustion of solid fuels in hybrid and solid rocket systems

- Ablative thermal protection in solid motors and hybrid rocket engines

- Combustion instabilities in liquid rocket engines

- System analysis in liquid rocket engines

- Satellite micro-propulsion systems

- Supercritical turbulent combustion modeling 

- Combustion in multi-phase flows

- Intrinsic instabilities in premixed flames

- Chemical kinetics model reduction of complex hydrocarbon mechanisms

- Pressure Oscillations in Solid Rocket Motors due to Vortex-sound - full 3D model & simplified modelling 

- Ignition Transient in Solid Rocket Motors - full 3D model & simplified modelling 

- Propellant Grain Design & Grain Burnback Analysis

- Analysis & Reconstruction of Solid Rocket Motors Performance from Real Firings 

- Internal Ballistics of Solid Rocket Motors for Performance Evalutation 

- Launch Vehicle Aero-Thermo-Fluid-Dynamics