Thermal hydraulic design analysis of ternary carbide fueled square-lattice honeycomb nuclear rocket engine

Details Thermal hydraulic design analysis of ternary carbide fueled square-lattice honeycomb nuclear rocket engine Thermal hydraulic design analysis of ternary carbide fueled square-lattice honeycomb nuclear rocket engine

Jan 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999aipc..458.1501f&link_type=abstract

Space technology and applications international forum -1999. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 458, pp. 1501-1506 (1999).

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A computational analysis is conducted to determine the optimum thermal-hydraulic design parameters for a square-lattice honeycomb nuclear rocket engine core that will incorporate ternary carbide based uranium fuels. Recent studies at the Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute (INSPI) have demonstrated the feasibility of processing solid solution, ternary carbide fuels such as (U, Zr, Nb)C, (U, Zr, Ta)C, (U, Zr, Hf)C and (U, Zr, W)C. The square-lattice honeycomb design provides high strength and is amenable to the processing complexities of these ultrahigh temperature fuels. A parametric analysis is conducted to examine how core geometry, fuel thickness and the propellant flow area effect the thermal performance of the nuclear rocket engine. The principal variables include core size (length and diameter) and fuel element dimensions. The optimum core configuration requires a balance between high specific impulse and thrust level performance, and maintaining the temperature and strength limits of the fuel. A nuclear rocket engine simulation code is developed and used to examine the system performance as well as the performance of the main reactor core components. The system simulation code was originally developed for analysis of NERVA-Derivative and Pratt & Whitney XNR-2000 nuclear thermal rockets. The code is modified and adopted to the square-lattice geometry of the new fuel design. Thrust levels ranging from 44,500 to 222,400 N (10,000 to 50,000 lbf) are considered. The average hydrogen exit temperature is kept at 2800 K, which is well below the melting point of these fuels. For a nozzle area ratio of 300 and a thrust chamber pressure of 4.8 Mpa (700 psi), the specific impulse is 930 s. Hydrogen temperature and pressure distributions in the core and the fuel maximum temperatures are calculated.

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