Autumn 2019
Prof. Hrishikesh Gadgil
Author: Sanskriti Bhansali
Pre-requisite courses: AE 223: Thermodynamics and Propulsion and AE 236: Compressible Fluid Mechanics
Pre-requisite skills: A lot of course content is what has been taught in AE 240: Spaceflight Mechanics and AE 236: Compressible Fluid Mechanics
Course Content:
- Introduction, Various propulsive devices used for aerospace applications.
- Classifications of rockets: Electric, Nuclear and Chemical rockets, Applications of rockets.
- Nozzle design: Flow through nozzle, Real nozzle, Equilibrium and frozen flow,
- Adaptive and non-adaptive nozzles. Thrust vector controls, Rocket performance parameters.
- Solid propellant rockets, Grain compositions. Design of grain.
- Liquid propellant rockets, Injector design, cooling systems, Feed Systems:
- Pressure feed and turbo-pump feed system.
- Heat transfer problems in rocket engines.
Information about Projects/Assignments: No projects/assignments. There were two quizzes, a midsem and an endsem.
Quizzes/Midsem/Endsem papers Difficulty: 3/5
Overall Course Difficulty: Moderate
Average Time Commitment: (Apart from lectures and tutorials) Between 3-6 hrs
Attendance Policy: Institute Policy (80%)
General funda: First half of the course is theory and may be boring, whereas second half is a lot of repetitive of previous courses. In general grading is very strict and no marks are awarded for numerical questions where final answers are not correct.
Grading stats: Only 3 students were awarded AA, 8- AB and 34 students got BB, BC, CC equally distributed.
Professor’s Teaching Style: Lecture slides aren’t provided, reference book needs to be used. Teaching pattern is a little boring and easy as well but then paper correction is really difficult.
Should you do this course?: Apart from being core course for Aerospace students, minor students can also take this up but isn’t recommended since the content is repeat of previously taught courses.