CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT ANGLES OF A SOLID-FUEL ROCKET NOZZLE AND ITS INFLUENCES ON THE MOTOR’S THRUST CURVE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main goal of this work is to investigate how the angles of a convergent-divergent rocket nozzle influence the thrust curve of a solid-propulsion rocket. The work has been conducted within an academic rocketry team. As there is not clear reasoning on how to define these angles, the present research provides insights on how these geometrical parameters influence the performance of a rocket motor. A 2D-axisymmetric CFD domain is considered, comprising the fluid domain inside and outside the nozzle, to give room for the shock waves to happen and also accommodate the flow. The study comprises a baseline geometry and twelve modified designs, varying the convergent and the divergent angles of the nozzle. Since the convergent diameter must match the chamber diameter, it is fixed. For the divergent diameter, there is no such restriction; therefore, there are two possibilities: a divergent section with the same divergent diameter or with the same length as the baseline. The benchmark thrust curve is generated with a MATLAB code based on solid-fuel modeling and the De Laval theory. The curve is divided into six steady-state simulations, using boundary conditions of mass flow, pressure and temperature at the inlet and pressure and temperature at the outlet. The baseline geometry is simulated in Ansys Fluent and normalized by the MATLAB benchmark. A mesh study selects which mesh and turbulence model to use based on this normalization. The modified geometries are then compared to the baseline. The main quantity of interest is the thrust but quantities such as static pressure and average velocity at the nozzle exit aid the understanding of the changes in thrust.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".