Design and Performance Optimization of Finocyl Grain

Abstract

The research work proposed herein addresses and emphasizes a design methodology to design and optimize Finocyl Grain configurations considering particular test case for which the Average thrust and constraints have been given. A parametric solid model of the grain has been developed which enables automatic volume calculation of the grain void and solid propellant at each web increment thereafter burning area has been calculated. The motor performance is calculated using a simplified ballistic model, steady state pressure is calculated by equating mass generated in chamber to mass ejected through nozzle throat. Genetic algorithm has been employed for conducting optimization thereby achieving the design and performance objectives while adhering to design constraints. Latin hypercube sampling is used for better design space exploration and thus creating initial population to decrease computation time. Sensitivity Analysis of the optimized solution has been conducted using Monte Carlo method to evaluate the effects of uncertainties in design parameters caused by manufacturing variations.

Finocyl Grain Design Using the Genetic Algorithm in Combination with Adaptive Basis Function Construction

“…Design Boundaries. The upper and lower boundaries of design variables of Finocyl grain [10] are presented as…”

“…It is clear that this try-and-error method is too expensive and is a very time-consuming method. The first attempt of grain design was performed by Sforzini [6]; other attempts are [2,3,[7][8][9][10][11] and [5].…”

Solid Rocket Motor Design Optimization Using Genetic Algorithm

“…Previous works were done on design, analysis and optimization of grain for SRM [2], [3]. Reference [4] developed an improved method for design of a SRM using sequential quadratic programming; additionally [5] and [6] used GA in grain and SRM optimization. References [7][8][9] provide comprehensive details on implementation of GA in design and optimization of rocket-based systems.…”

Kick Solid Rocket Motor Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Using Genetic Algorithm

“…The genetic algorithm (GA) global optimization method is increasingly being used in optimization of aerospace and propulsion systems (Kamran et al, 2009;Tedford and Martins, 2010;Riddle et al, 2007;Rafique et al, 2009). Bayley and Hartfield (2007) used GA in multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO).…”