Solid-propellant rocket motors for tactical missiles require low cost, low maintenance level, immediate availability and high performance. Their main goal is to supply the required thrust and impulse to the missile to perform the mission they are designed to.
Advanced rocket motor nozzles aspire to improve the rocket motor performance by variable means or to increase the system designer freedom, using non-conventional geometries.
An investigation has been conducted, experimentally and theoretically, to study the effect of changing the rocket motor nozzle cross section from round to rectangular on its ballistics performance. In general, the experiments showed that the use of rectangular losses results in minor losses in performance in comparison to axisymmetric nozzles. An adequate rectangular nozzle design can significantly reduce these losses.
