Your Contributions and Roadmap
Help make a working spaceplane engine happen – contribute some knowledge, time or work towards making ASPIRE work. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch by clicking on the "Contact" link located at the bottom of this page.
We don’t wish to limit your imagination, but have suggested several possible ways in which you can contribute to the project within this page.
At present, from our perspective, the most important missing information is experimental confirmation of the pellets’ mixing behaviour as outlined in the separate section entitled “Main mixing experiments” in our main experiments page.
Ways you can contribute
Experiments
Experimental ideas are listed below:
Study and perfection of simple supersonic wind-tunnels, imaging and instrumentation systems. How to do this is explained in our experiments page.
The effect of different wedge shapes and forms
The effect of different fuel injectors (velocity and direction of injection)
Breakup of pellets and fuel release
Direct injection of gas (non-pelletized)
Combustion – ignition and sustaining combustion. This is the next stage of research after getting the air-fuel mixing right
Amateur rocketry engine test vehicle
Theory
Theoretical ideas in which you can contribution are suggested below:
Design of a whole single-speed test engine for launching on a small rocket (HyBE system).
Design of (fixed) intake sections for various speeds
Design of intake sections with variable geometry
Options for placement and behaviour of wedges
The effect of different wedge shapes and forms
The effect of different fuel injectors (velocity and direction of injection)
Behaviour prediction of pellets in flow-field
Breakup of pellets and fuel release
Total pressure losses in system and its efficiency
Simulation
Simulations you can contribute are suggested below:
CFD simulation of the effect of different types of wedges in different configurations (airflow, pellet reactions, mixing)
The effect of different fuel injectors (velocity and direction of injection)
Combustion simulation
Whole test-engine simulation
Matlab efficiency model
Proposed project road-map
This diagram shows a road-map to a final working engine. The diagram will help you to find interesting topics to research or develop. Some of the inital parts have already been done (although more knowledge and modelling can be added to confirm or complete them) – and these are shown in red.
Shown in blue are those parts which are currently on-going. The parts in green have largely yet to be started. Finally, the mustard/orange shaded blocks involve the integration of the whole concept into an engine and will start when all the individual components have been fully understood and developed.
Note that simulation of combustion is fraught with difficulty and inaccuracy and so practical experiments of this aspect may take precedence over theory and simulation.
