Rocketry

A grid of colorful triangles, which become much smaller in an area shaped like rocket fins. — CFD mesh around rocket fins, used for aerodynamics simulations.

UCSD Rocket Propulsion Lab #

I was a member of UCSD Rocket Propulsion Lab for all 4 of my years at UCSD. During my first year, I took part in the New Member Project, learning the basic principles of rocketry by designing a small, solid-propellant model rocket. After that, I joined the Analysis team, and after about a year became the Lead Analysis Engineer.

My work on the analysis team focused on computational fluid dynamics simulations, generally using ANSYS Fluent. For some specific projects, we used other software such as OpenRocket (for center of pressure analysis and flight simulations) and GT Suite (for pipe flow approximations in cases where standard CFD was too computationally expensive).

One major project I worked on was simulating heat transfer from the combustion chamber to the walls and into the regenerative cooling channels, working with the Propulsion team to iterate through cooling channel designs. We didn’t have the computational resources to simulate both the combustion and cooling channels at once, so I found the hat gas properties inside the engine and used empirical heat transfer results to find the appropriate heat flux through the engine walls. I also worked to ensure that the fin geometry provided enough drag at the right location to keep the center of pressure behind the center of mass, ensuring the rocket’s stability, while still maximizing the apogee.