Welcome to the Liquid Engine Sizing Tool, a project aimed at creating a comprehensive engine design tool for liquid rocket engines. This tool provides a complete solution for sizing the combustion chamber, injector and nozzle geometry of your engine.

My goal with this project is not only to create a tool that can be useful for others, but also to learn more about the design of liquid rocket engines myself. By implementing this tool, I hope to gain deeper insights into the complex process of engine design.

This is a small roadmap of stuff I want to implement:

Phase 0: Design Selection

This is basically the phase before any calculations where you look into the requirements of the engine. This is stuff like selecting propellant, defining thrust level etc.

• Implement a way to find the optimal O/F ratio for Isp for a propellant combination
• Implement a way to find an appropriate value for the L*
• Implement a way to find propellant combinations
• Improve the L* availablility
• Make a simple vehicle dynamics analyzer so you can find what Exit Pressure is most optimal for your engine
• Maybe add some kind of tradeoff tool so you can make choices

Known values: T, Pe, Pa_design, O/F, L*, Fuel, Oxidizer

Phase 1: Preliminary Design

This phase involves the initial layout of the engine in such a way that all engine dimensions are known.

• Implement initial sizing of engine characteristics

Known values: pressure ratio, mw, gamma, expansion ratio, combustion temperature, throat temperature, exit velocity, mass flow rate, Isp, throat area, exit area

• Implement engine geometry
• Implement various options for nozzles like bell and conical
• Calculate engine volume
• Calculate combustion chamber dimensions
• Plot the engine geometry (WIP)

Phase 2: Initial analysis

This phase involves analysing the requirements of the subsystems of the engine like the cooling and injectors.

• Simulate the heat flux through the engine
• Find out cooling channel requirements
• Simulate the injector requirements
• Find pressure and thermal stresses on material

Phase 3: Initial Design

This phase involves coming up with an initial design from the initial analysis

• Implement some kind of material selection method
• Implement the ability for multiple materials (multi material printing)
• Mass estimation for various materials
• Allow for material trade-off
• Allow for injector trade-off
• Analyse combustion stability in the injector

Phase 4: Detail Analysis

• Implement FEM methods to analyse stresses on materials
• Simulate fluid flow through the injector
• Simulate combustion instability
• Simulate combustion chamber efficiencies

Phase 5: Detail Design

• Allow for easy export to CAD software
• Allow for export of heat fluxes for FEM

Phase 6: Validation

• Allow for checking simulation with tested data
• Allow for determining pressures/temperatures at certain positions so it can be compared to sensor data

Phase 7: Feed system simulation

• Allow for more advanced feed system design simulations
• Allow for basic tank requirements

Phase 8: Turbomachinery

• Add turbomachinery design capabilities