Solid-propellant rocket propulsion is commonly used for both military and civilian launch systems. In solid rocket motors the required thrust profile is determined by its design and cannot be changed or controlled after production. In addition to the thrust profile, there are other design goals and constraints, both at a system level and at the rocket motor level. This makes the design of a rocket a complex process that involves many coupled design variables.. The detailed design is largely based on professional experience applied in a manual, iterative process, and therefore not readily available to the system engineer. Instead, the system engineer needs to rely on rough estimations for the propulsion system during initial system design. These estimations could be non-feasible regarding the rocket motor or sub-optimal for the complete system.
The current research presents a novel model of a solid rocket motor that combines several models with different levels of accuracy in order to quickly estimate the impact of the design variables on the systems’ performance. The model is employed for quick, automated initial design and is used in finding an optimal solution of several case studies. Furthermore, a comparative study of selected optimization algorithms is presented in order find the best suitable algorithm and parameters for a robust, prompt convergence.
