Aerospace engineering research team wins Solid Rockets best paper

Two aerospace engineering professors, Roy Hartfield and Joe Majdalani, doctoral candidate Griffin DiMaggio and alumnus Vivek Ahuja were awarded the 2022 Solid Rockets Best Paper award at the SciTech ’23 forum, held Jan. 22-27 in Fort Washington, Maryland, and sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or AIAA. A record 2,700 papers were presented.

The paper, “Solid Rocket Motor Internal Ballistics with a Surface-Vorticity Solver,” introduces an innovative and robust computational approach that is capable of translating panel codes, which have been traditionally developed for the purpose of predicting the external aerodynamic performance of air vehicles, to the internal flow field characteristics of solid rocket motors. Specifically, a surface-vorticity approach, originally intended for external flow applications, is adapted for internal flow analysis using boundary conditions that are suitable for solid rocket motors.

“This study shows that an enhanced panel code can resolve internal rocket flow fields with a striking level of fidelity and with such a degree of computational efficiency to make it valuable in the conceptual and preliminary design of rocket motors,” said Majdalani, the Hugh and Loeda Francis Chair of Excellence, who devotes research to the computational modeling and optimization of swirling flows and acoustic oscillations in solid, liquid and hybrid rocket engines.

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