Portable Rocket Propulsion Analysis Standard 1.2.0

Portable Rocket Propulsion Analysis Standard 1.2.0 is created to provide you with a simple yet effective multi-platform rocket engine analysis tool for rocketry professionals, scientists, students and amateurs.

For many years rocketry scientists, students and amateurs were using command-line MS-DOS or UNIX programs to calculate the performance of the rocket engines. While the accuracy of the old programs is still sufficient for many cases, the old-fashioned interface has poor usability, whereas the lack or absence of active development makes it difficult to satisfy new user requirements. With release of the RPA, software.lpre.de offers the modern rocket engines analysis tool and promises continuous further development of the program.

RPA is an easy-to-use multi-platform tool for the performance prediction of rocket engines. It features an intuitive graphical user interface with convenient grouping the input parameters and analysis results. RPA utilizes an expandable chemical species library based on NASA Glenn thermodynamic database and Gurvich thermodynamic database, that includes data for numerous fuels and oxidizers, such as liquid hydrogen and oxygen, kerosene, hydrogen peroxide, MMH, and many others. With embedded species editor, the users may also easily define new propellant components, or import components from PROPEP or CEA2 species databases.

By providing a few engine parameters such as combustion chamber pressure, used propellant components, and nozzle parameters, the program obtains chemical equilibrium composition of combustion products, determines its thermodynamic properties, and predicts the theoretical rocket performance. The results of calculation can also be used to design combustion chambers, gas generators and preburners of the liquid propellant rocket engines. RPA is written in C++ programming language using following libraries: Qt, Qwt, libconfig++.

Major Features:

1. Scripting module to solve user's own problems, extending standard capabilities of the program
2. Propellant analysis tool to evaluate different propellant compositions, with stepwise replacement of one component with another one
3. Determination of combustion chamber size for given thrust, propellant mass flow rate, or throat diameter, with capability to export the resulting contour to DXF file
4. Designing parabolic nozzle contour or truncated ideal nozzle contour (TIC) using axisymmetric method of characteristics, with capability to export the resulting contour to DXF file
5. Producing publication-quality plots (in raster or vector format)
6. Output of results to PDF or ODF format
7. Analysis of monopropellant and bipropellant rocket engines
8. Analysis of rocket propulsion engines with an arbitrary set of propellant components (multipropellant systems)
9. Robust, proven and industry-accepted Gibbs free energy minimization approach is used to obtain the combustion composition
10. Calculation of performance for a finite- and infinite-area combustion chambers
11. Analysis of nozzle flows with shifting and frozen chemical equilibrium
12. Calculation of thrust coefficient, characteristic velocity and specific impulse (sea level, optimum expansion, vacuum)
13. Optimisation of propellant components mixture ratio for maximum specific impulse of bipropellant systems
14. Altitude performance analysis
15. Analysis of nozzle performance with respect to overexpansion and flow separation
16. Throttled engine performance analysis
17. Estimation of test (delivered) nozzle performance
18. Expandable thermodynamic data library based on NASA Glenn thermodynamic database includes data for numerous combustion product species, as well as data for such propellant components as hydrogen, oxygen, RP-1, RG-1, sintin, methane, propane, hydrogen peroxide, MMH, and many other
19. Built-in species database editor: the users can incorporate into the thermodynamic data library his/her own chemical species, or species obtained from third parties
20. Tool for import components from PROPEP or CEA2 species databases
21. Nested analysis tool to evaluate the performance under dufferent conditions, stepping of up to four independent variables (component ratio, chamber pressure, nozzle inlet conditions, nozzle exit conditions)
22. Multi-platform graphical user interface for Microsoft® Windows™ (both x86 and x86-64), as well as for Apple® Mac OS X and Linux
23. Supported units for input data:
    • pressure: MPa, Pa, atm, bar, psia, kg/cm2
    • mass flux: kg/(m2 -s), lbm/(ft2 -s)
    • temperature: K, R, C, F
24. Results output in SI or U.S. customary units
25. Output of results to Plain Text or HTML format
26. Graphical output of results of altitude and throttled engine performance analysis
27. Printing results of analysis
28. Two modes for comfortable work: Express Analysis and Extended Analysis

Enhancements:

• Scripting module to solve user's own problems, extending standard capabilities of the program
• Propellant analysis tool to evaluate different propellant compositions, with stepwise replacement of one component with another one
• Determination of combustion chamber size for given thrust, propellant mass flow rate, or throat diameter
• Designing parabolic or moc tic nozzle contour with capability to export the resulting contour to dxf file
• Producing publication-quality plots (in raster or vector format)