Analysis of heat transfer in an academic rocket engine using numerical methods

• Autor(a) principal: Maia, Felipe Pinheiro
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRN
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufrn.br/handle/123456789/43042
• topic: Transferência de Calor; Numerical methods; Thermal analysis; Heat transfer; Rockets; Thermal insulation

The aerospace sector has great importance for the technological development of a nation, since it has diverse applications, from the area of telecommunications to questions of the defense of the national sovereignty. Thus, the study of space vehicles, and their design complexities, is necessary. One of the main problems in the development of rockets is the temperature, which reaches very high values in the combustion chamber of the rocket engine, which ends up creating a high temperature gradient and, consequently, facilitating the heat transmission to parts of the fuselage, which may not tolerate marked heating due to their material. In this work, numerical methods was used to thermally analyze the heat transfer of a class J engine to the fuselage, built in composite, of a 1500 m apogee academic rocket. A maximum temperature of 80°C was established in the walls of the body tube, due to the Glass Transition Temperature, so that the objective was to find, through the simulation of several insulation configurations, the configuration that would best maintain the structural integrity of the rocket. Graphs of the temperature distribution were obtained along the analyzed model, as well as graphs of validation of the results. It was concluded that the best configuration was the use of timber as structural material and fiberglass as insulator.