AEROSPACE ENGINEERING TOPICS

ABSTRACT.

Military acquisition programs have long been criticized for the exponential growth in development costs required to generate modest improvements in capability. One of the most promising reform efforts to address this trend is the open system architecture initiative, which uses modular design principles and commercial interface standards as a means to reduce the cost and complexity of upgrading systems over time. While conceptually simple, this effort has proven to be excep...

ABSTRACT

Combustion instabilities in rocket engines are caused by coupling between the combustion processes and pressure oscillations in a combustor, and they are characterized by the frequencies and shapes of the acoustic modes of the combustion chamber. Acoustic resonators are commonly installed in combustors to provide passive acoustic damping and prevent combustion instabilities. Previously, it has been proposed that the propellant injectors in a combustor can be tuned to act as...

SUMMARY Recent technological developments have resulted in the emergence of new advanced vehicles such as suborbital vehicles and personal air vehicles. These innovative vehicles have in turn opened up new markets that are characterized by a large and complex solution space that requires designers to account for multiple objectives in early design phases. The complexity of these new vehicles also gives rise to a large combinatorial space of possible configurations for which no baseline has be...