Rocket Engine Nozzle Material

Elon musk founder ceo and cto of spacex recently tweeted a short video of how a rocket nozzle is formed.

Nozzle jet guns. When the engine heats up the nozzle will reach a state of thermal equilibrium and will glow white or red hot in colour. Spacex is a forward thinking aerospace manufacturing company with amazing innovations always on the horizon. The value of these three flow variables are all determined by the rocket nozzle design.

A rocket engine nozzle is a propelling nozzle usually of the de laval type used in a rocket engine to expand and accelerate the combustion gases produced by burning propellants so that the exhaust gases exit the nozzle at hypersonic velocities. At the time nozzles were made out of a single piece of molded polycrystalline graphite supported by metal housing structures. The rocket pumps and a combustion chamber generates high pressure a few hundred atmospheresthe nozzle turns the static high pressure.

They were built up of phenolic wraps and included a flexible bearing for thrust vector control. Most high power rocket nozzles are made from graphite. The scaled metal prototype is expected to consume 30 percent less fuel than conventional engines.

This kind of cooling is used in missiles too. Nozzles may also be made of composite materials such as the sts solid rocket booster nozzles. In 2011 the company received 650000 in phase ii to use the material in creating a prototype 6 inch stub nozzle that could be mated with an rl10 engine supplied by aerojet rocketdyne.

While advances have been made in material and propellant sciences this serves to illustrate the difficulty in designing rocket nozzles to withstand these pressures and temperatures without melting. Cold gas thruster nozzles may be manufactured of more common materials stainless steel using normal manufacturing techniques. The amount of thrust produced by the engine depends on the mass flow rate through the engine the exit velocity of the flow and the pressure at the exit of the engine.

Researchers at the fraunhofer institute for material and beam technology iws in dresden and tu dresdens aerospace experts developed an additively manufactured rocket engine with an aerospike nozzle for microlaunchers. Graphite is an excellent material for nozzles for many reasons. Graphite rods come in many sizes and densities.

A rocket engine uses a nozzle to accelerate hot exhaust to produce thrust as described by newtons third law of motion. The companies worked in tandem to design the nozzle extensions and ensure they possessed satisfactory strength and thermal integrity. I recommend purchasing lower density graphite to learn on.