The proposed engine concept is the Nuclear Enhanced Airbreathing Rocket (NEAR).The NEAR concept uses a fission reactor to thermally heat a propellant in a rocket plenum. The rocket is shrouded, thus the exhaust mixes with ingested air to provide additional thermal energy through combustion. The combusted flow is then expanded through a nozzle to provide thrust.
Fission Power SystemsNuclear reactions can be divided into two categories: fission and fusion reactions.Significant work has been performed in fission reactor design for space flight applications. In the 1960's the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project developed a nuclear thermal fission reactor designed for launch applications _. This project reached the ground testing stage before it was canceled. The more recently developed SP-100 and SPAR reactors are designed to provide power for electric based engines and onboard subsystems 2.The NERVA reactor concept is used in this study as the power source for the NEAR concept. A schematic of a NERVA reactor is shown in Figure 1. The NERVA reactor was chosen for its relatively mature technology. Calculations based on the NERVA concept yield conservative performance for a nuclear reactor in a launch scenario. A particle bed reactor design yields power to weight ratios nearly an order of magnitude greater than NERVA. Nuclear testing of single fuel elements and criticality experiments of a prototype core was achieved before the particle bed reactor program was discontinued.The NEAR computer code is designed to modeI the flow through a shrouded rocket where the rocket is powered by nuclear heating of the propellant. Figure 2 illustrates the geometry of the NEAR engine. The code calculates flow properties at each individual station shown in the figure by applying the appropriate closed form compressible and conservation https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20010020152 2018-05-10T12:36:24+00:00Z
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