Study and design of a low cost cooled nozzle through metal additive manufacturing

State of the art rocket engines are reaching performance levels that have become limited by the available manufacturing techniques. With a great focus on these engines’ efficiency, rocket engine producers are focusing on increasing combustion chamber pressures and temperatures, which in turn produces increasingly greater structural and thermal loads. Complex cooling systems are usually used to tackle this issue, being the most predominant formula to use the stored cryogenic propellant as a coolant before being injected in the combustion pressure, more commonly known as regenerative cooling. However, these cooling systems are limited by the state of the art manufacturing techniques. To deal with this issue, efforts have been made to implement modern metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques to rocket engine production. In order to show the extent of the benefits of such innovations, a rocket engine nozzle has been designed following the characteristics of SpaceX’s latest Raptor engines. This design has been tested through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations so as to validate its performance parameters and study how the implementation of metal AM techniques would improve the engine’s performance. The economic feasibility of such implementation has been studied through the comparison to former techniques, as well as their impact to the environment