Contour design of aerospike nozzle and comparison of performance

This Paper has been excavating and investigating two different types of Aerospike nozzles such as external aerospike nozzle and internal-external aerospike nozzle. The main reason for using aerospike nozzle over bell nozzle is automatic altitude compensation. With the help of Method of characteristics and MATLAB codes, geometry of both the nozzles has been created in GAMBIT and flow analysis has been carried out in FLUENT for desired exit Mach number. Analysis has been carried out for both types of nozzles with different truncations. However, in this paper the fuel was taken as Papi 94 and Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) with N
₂
O as an oxidant and the combustion products were entered in FLUENT by selecting species transport. The desired exit Mach number resulted in FLUENT is compared to the designed exit Mach number in code for both the two nozzles and their truncations.