Precise Design of Solid Rocket Motor Heat Insulation Layer Thickness under Nonuniform Dynamic Burning Rate

Abstract

With the purpose of obtaining optimal designs of the heat insulating layers in solid rocket motors, we have proposed a numerical approach to compute the ideal thickness of the heat insulating layer. The proposed method is compatible with solid rocket motors that have any shape and any manner of erosion. The nonuniform dynamic burning rate is taken into consideration to achieve higher accuracy. A high-performance code is developed that uses triangular geometry as an input to allow exchanging data from any CAD platform. An improved geometric intersection algorithm is developed to generate the required sampling points, saving 35% computation time compared to its open source equivalent. Parallel computing technology is utilized to further improve the performance. All operations of the proposed approach can be executed automatically by programs, eliminating the manual work of gathering data from CAD software in the traditional approach. Validation data shows that the proposed approach saves 3.85% of the mass compared to the ordinary design approach. Performance profiling shows that the implemented code operates within 5 seconds, which is much faster than the unoptimized open source version.