Liquid Rockets
Detailed write up of kerosene/gox engine pending
Brief overview:
My math professor and I worked on designing a kerosene/gox engine after I became interested in the subject and asked for his help. We made some progress on the engine, we decided on fuel and oxidizer, engine size, thrust and other simple stuff but ran into some difficulty with the actual engine geometry due to its inter-dependency. For example the chamber pressure dictates the injector design but the injector's performance is influenced by the throat area which in turn is dependent on the overall mass flow rate but the mass flow rate is also tied to the combustion efficiency which is affected by the chamber pressure. We found that we had to essentially select initial values somewhat arbitrarily, then refine them through successive iterations. This was quite difficult with very limited time to work on it and without much background knowledge or a defined end goal other than having designed a liquid engine. Despite the annoying nature of the codependency of the design I found it very fun and an very interesting problem because there was no formula or any real concrete way of going about it in the beginning.