Our cooling team have recently been working on Bamboo, a set of analysis and modelling tools that predicts the temperatures and thermal stresses across combustion chambers. It takes user specified parameters and produces outputs to assist with easy optimisation of designs.
Bamboo outputs steady state temperature data, which can be used to predict stresses in the engine from thermal expansion. Isentropic flow relations and heat transfer coefficients are used to obtain the temperatures.
Above is a simulation produced using Bamboo to model White Giant, the engine that will take Griffin 1 to space.
The following output was produced from the stress analysis section of bamboo. It works by adjusting the yield stress at each position along the engine, calculating the thermal stress due to the temperature difference between the chamber side and coolant side, and compares it to that adjusted yield stress.
The results are then visually represented on this 2D render of the cooling jacket, which is shown below along with a 3D representation, created on SolidWorks.
For a more detailed and comprehensive introduction to the software, see the Wiki and the Jupyter Notebook developed by our team.