SBIR-STTR Award

ASI is pleased to team with ATK to present a novel concept for enabling large nozzle area ratio increases for future solid divert and attitude control system (SDACS) valves/thrusters. The proposed effort will demonstrate feasibility of this advanced concept through a thorough design study that includes mechanical layout and packaging, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of nozzle performance and a kill vehicle performance comparison. We anticipate those analyses will show quite significant kill vehicle divert performance increase. To support that conclusion for our proposal, we completed a survey of state of the art in extendible nozzles and used the relative performance rankings we found in the literature to determine whether our solution represents a significant advance in state of the art. That comparison shows that our proposed solution enables a two- to five-fold increase in area ratio (for the same length) over a fixed bell nozzle, and a 40% to 100% increase in area ratio over state-of-the-art extendible nozzles. Weight and reliability impacts are minimal.

Keywords:
Advanced Nozzles, Solid Propellant, Solid Rocket Motors

Analytical Services, Inc., is pleased to present this proposal for a lightweight, low cost, high area ratio extendible nozzle design that will provide significant increases in solid divert and attitude control system (SDACS) divert performance. We propose to use a combination of low cost, lightweight refractory materials formed, using selective laser melting (SLM), into extremely efficient structural configurations, which provides the basic nozzle structure. The nozzle extensions are passively deployed using the SDACS propellant ignition and held in their extended position using passive, simple mechanical interfaces. Our Phase I study showed a significant increase in achievable area ratio, which, when combined with the low-weight, compact throttling approach, increased divert specific impulse (Isp) performance. When adding additional propellant due to the newly-emptied internal volume (due to the extreme packaging efficiency of our nozzle design), divert delta-V performance increased significantly. Approved for Public Release 14-MDA-7739 (18 March 14).

Keywords:
Nozzle, Selective Laser Melting (Slm), Refractory Materials, Solid Divert And Attitude Control Systems (Sdacs)