Solid-Rocket-Motor Performance-Matching Design Framework

Abstract

An effective performance-matching design framework for solid rocket motor tailored toward satisfying various thrust-performance requirements is presented in this research paper through an innovative and specialized general-design approach developed to evaluate the general-design parameters. During the general-design stage, a combination of grain web and area ratio is selected as the design variables to be adjusted to obtain the general parameters. Based on the general parameters obtained, a grain-design stage incorporates the level-set method and simulates solid-propellant evolution and internal ballistic analysis, thereby obtaining the thrust performance. Grain-design effectiveness is determined by how closely the designed solid-rocket-motor performance matches and compares to a prespecified thrust curve. An efficient sequential-field-approximate-optimization algorithm is proposed and used to minimize the average rms error between the desired and designed thrusts. Validation of the proposed design framework is carried out by evaluating motor cases possessing different thrust requirements, and results obtained highlight the proposed framework as a practical and efficient strategy for solid-rocket-motor designs.