Design of a Small Scale Aerospike Nozzle and Associated Testing Infrastructure for Experimental Evaluation of Aerodynamic Thrust Vectoring

Utah State University

A system for cold flow testing of an aerospike nozzle has been developed in an effort to examine the effectiveness of aerodynamic thrust vectoring and truncated nozzle base bleed. These tests are designed to produce result that will support the design of a system for hot flow testing of the same technologies. Design of a nozzle suitable for testing with reasonable cold-gas mass flow rates and measureable forces and moments involved an extensive parametric study. Conceptual-level computational fluid dynamics results for aerodynamic thrust vectoring and base bleed are also described.