Perpustakaan Digital ITB

As the pioneer of Indonesia’s rocketry, National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN) continue to develop their rocket technology. Recently, LAPAN has been seriously conducting research on liquid rocket engines. Several liquid rocket engines have been produced to serve as experimental models, such as RCX-150, which desired to produce 150 kgf of thrust. The current RCX-150 leaves a room of improvement in its nozzle design as its conical nozzle is considered inefficient. Therefore, the present research is conducted to design the optimum nozzles for RCX-150. Using the existing technology in LAPAN, the new nozzles were determined to be bell nozzle, with conical nozzle as its comparison. The bell nozzle type is the Thrust Optimized Parabolic (TOP) nozzle. It is based on method from G.V.R.Rao to generate a Thrust Optimized Contoured Nozzle using parabolic equation. The method would result more efficient nozzle than cone or ideal bell nozzle. A Computational Fluid Dynamics Method (CFD) is used to simulate the nozzle design. The simulation was carried out in axis-symmetric condition using commercial CFD software. Later, the result was validated through the utilization of analytic calculation. However, the research also served to accommodate future experimental method by producing the selected nozzle design. The present research also presented the experiment design and setup.