Proposal of a Novel Dual-Bell Axisymmetric Rocket Propulsive Nozzle Design

The dual-bell propulsive nozzle is an altitudeadaptive nozzle design that has been the focus of extensive research. It provides two working modes, sea-level and highaltitude modes without requiring of mechanical activation devices, resulting in improved payload capacity and enhanced performance for space rockets. This study presents an innovative subscale dual-bell axisymmetric nozzle design developed using an in-house method of characteristics (MoC) code. Numerical simulations utilizing the ANSYS Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver were performed to validate the design and examine the flow characteristics and performance of the dual-bell nozzle. The results demonstrated the reliability of the in-house MoC design code and validated the potential of the proposed nozzle design.