An Efficient Approach for Nozzle Rocket Thrust Estimation

This paper investigates a new approach for efficiently calculating nozzle thrust based on a reduced order model formed by the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique. The investigation has been done on the nozzle of MK66 rocket motor as a prototype problem. Here, the focus is on the thrust response in or near the design condition. It was found that the proposed method performs exceptionally well even with a few POD basis functions extracted from limited number of flow snapshots. Various interpolation techniques for estimating the dynamic of the reduced order model have been investigated as well. In the current study, the results suggested that there is no significant difference in the thrust estimation from those techniques.