Experimental and Computational Investigation of Sounding Solid Rocket Motor

Abstract

Experimental sounding rockets are important contributors to aerospace engineering research. However, experimental-sounding rockets are rarely used for student research projects by institutes in India. The unavailability of rocket motors, which require complex machining and explosive propellants, is a major barrier to the use of sounding rockets in student research projects. We ran into this problem while developing a sounding rocket motor for project and learning purposes. The project focuses on designing and constructing a solid rocket motor that researchers can use as the primary propulsion unit in experimental sounding rockets. Initially, basic designs were evaluated, as various concepts of observations of propellant configuration. The accessibility and ease of use of manufacturing and casting of propellants played a significant role in determining the best propellant based on these findings, the theoretical values for combustion chamber parameters were obtained. Also, materials were chosen accordingly, and a fundamental small-scale experimental design was built and extensively tested. This small-scale motor was created by combining all of the analysis and theoretical data.At experimental testing, we got to know the thrust generated is 763.47N and the motor runs for 4.1 sec, the total mass of the propellant is maxed at 1500g which gives us the max mass flow rate of 0.65Kg/sec this is the output for our solid rocket motor.