Solid Propulsion: Motor Interior Ballistics - Modeling and Design

Virtual engineering, a combination of numerical simulation, empiricalism, and small-scale testing for validation, is useful for motor design and is rapidly becoming the standard tool for designing new motors. Appropriate physics-based models are required for the propellant, chamber, nozzle, and plume regions. We discuss some modern developments of physics-based models used in virtual engineering, and comment on current trends. We anticipate that virtual engineering will one day be used at the design stage, with full scale motor firings reserved as a final qualification test.