Designing and Fabricating a Vortex Aerospike Rocket Engine

Abstract

On average, 51% of a rocket engine’s weight is in the cooling system, so finding anengine design that would drastically reduce the engine's weight, complexity, and production costwould be extremely beneficial. Small one-stage rockets will be the main method for smallerorganizations to reach orbit shortly. The engine must be efficient at sea level and in space toachieve this. Since the start of spaceflight in the 1960s, many innovations on the typical rocketengine have been theorized, but few have been adopted. This project takes two innovationspreviously theorized and tested, vortex cooling and aerospike nozzle, and combines them in aproof of concept prototype. First, the prototype was designed in Computer-Aided-Design andthen validated in a Compusonal-Fluid-Dynamic simulation. Next, the design was fabricated outof mostly hardware store materials. The custom nozzle design was made throughlost-PLA-casting. Many tests were conducted with this prototype, and 4 data points werecollected: nozzle temperature, combustion chamber temperature, chamber pressure, and thrust.The data collected showed the success of the vortex cooling method, as the chamber temperaturewas much cooler than the nozzle temperature. The engine's success as a whole was validated bythe thrust data. This project shows that a vortex aerospike design is a viable and useful idea. Afunctioning rocket engine can be created relatively inexpensively and with widely available partsand proves that departing from typical rocket engine design can lead to beneficial findings.