Designing and Fabricating a Vortex Aerospike Rocket Engine

Abstract

On average, 51% of a rocket engine’s weight is in the cooling system, so finding an
engine design that would drastically reduce the engine's weight, complexity, and production cost
would be extremely beneficial. Small one-stage rockets will be the main method for smaller
organizations to reach orbit shortly. The engine must be efficient at sea level and in space to
achieve this. Since the start of spaceflight in the 1960s, many innovations on the typical rocket
engine have been theorized, but few have been adopted. This project takes two innovations
previously theorized and tested, vortex cooling and aerospike nozzle, and combines them in a
proof of concept prototype. First, the prototype was designed in Computer-Aided-Design and
then validated in a Compusonal-Fluid-Dynamic simulation. Next, the design was fabricated out
of mostly hardware store materials. The custom nozzle design was made through
lost-PLA-casting. Many tests were conducted with this prototype, and 4 data points were
collected: nozzle temperature, combustion chamber temperature, chamber pressure, and thrust.
The data collected showed the success of the vortex cooling method, as the chamber temperature
was much cooler than the nozzle temperature. The engine's success as a whole was validated by
the thrust data. This project shows that a vortex aerospike design is a viable and useful idea. A
functioning rocket engine can be created relatively inexpensively and with widely available parts
and proves that departing from typical rocket engine design can lead to beneficial findings.