Automatic altitude compensation has been a holy grail of rocket propulsion for decades. Current state-of-the-art bell nozzles see large performance decreases at low altitudes, limiting rocket designs, shrinking payloads, and overall increasing costs. Aerospike nozzles are an old idea from the 1960’s that provide superior altitude-compensating performance and enhanced performance in vacuum, but have survivability issues that have stopped their application in satellite propulsion systems. A growing need for CubeSat propulsion systems provides the impetus to study aerospike nozzles in this application. This study built two aerospike nozzles using modern 3D metal printing techniques to test aerospikes at a size small enough to be potentially used on a CubeSat. Results indicated promising in-space performance, but further testing to determine thermal limits is deemed necessary.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-8545 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| Creators | Armstrong, Isaac W. |
| Publisher | DigitalCommons@USU |
| Source Sets | Utah State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | All Graduate Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | Copyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact digitalcommons@usu.edu. |
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