NEW Rocket Engine Revealed By A.I.!

[00:00:00]The impossible rocket engine has finally been revealed. It is an entire monolithic one piece build that is capable of outputting 4,000 lb of thrust. It's called the rotating detonation engine. We have known about this engine for decades, but now we're finally starting to build real prototypes, and it's a really exciting time for rocketry. Now, if you can perfect this design, you can have an automatically adjusted rocket engine that is able to go from ground all the way into space and maintain its efficiency.

[00:00:30]Now, that's really nice if you want to have a single stage to orbit vehicle, but designing this type of rocket engine is very tricky because you need to have the right kind of materials that can handle these higher pressures and temperatures.

[00:00:45]Now, this type of engine has two major attributes with the first being the arrow spike. Unlike a bell-shaped nozzle, it's able to automatically compensate for the altitude change. This component is usually a protrusion or a wedge and it can come in different forms such as the linear or toward. It allows the exhaust to expand against ambient air pressure rather than a solid surface. So as it's climbing during the ascent, the exhaust plume adjusts its own expansion. This means it can go from ground level all the way to orbital space. In theory, this gives it a competitive advantage over a typical bell nozzle where you can have over and under expansion. But despite the theoretical advantage, the central spike is surrounded by hot exhaust. So you have to find a material that can handle these extreme temperatures and pressures. And this is why the aerospike is really tricky to scale up into larger designs. It is true that NASA did develop the aerospike several decades ago. Their X33 experimental program was going to be a single-staged orbit vehicle. The engine itself actually worked in prototyping, but it brought up a complicated problem when designing single stage orbit rockets.

[00:01:57]So in most chemical rockets, you need a fuel and an oxidizer to produce thrust.

[00:02:01]And in this particular case, they were trying to use hydrogen because it can provide a high specific impulse, which is very critical in a single stage to orbit vehicle. But you typically need aluminum lithium matrix to contain hydrogen. It leaks very easily. So they were trying to use composites and shortcut to get some of the weight savings, but they ran into quite a few problems doing that. A good analogy is like comparing a titanium to a composite submarine. So the X33 was an ambitious program that tried to fully utilize the potential of an aerospike engine, but the technology to fabricate this material was not very mature at the time. So the program quickly became overbudget and it wasn't successful. So, it can be argued that the tanks were definitely a problem in the X33, but it also could be argued that the aerospike itself was not advanced enough to make this vehicle viable. Today's a little bit different because now we're building more robust and reliable composite tanks, and we are starting to use different fuels. Methane is really interesting because it's about six times more dense than hydrogen, and you can fit the same mass of fuel into a much smaller and lighter tank. and it's very comparable to storing at liquid oxygen temperatures. The trade-off is that it's a little bit less specific impulse when compared to hydrogen. But methane's a really good propellant for its simplicity and it's a lot easier to contain in a lightweight composite tank.

[00:03:27]Rocket Lab recently revealed one of the biggest AFP machines and it's able to place fibers layer by layer building very large composite tanks and the walls can be made of hundreds of layers. New materials like nanop particles, even carbon nano tubes can be mixed in with this resin to fill in microscopic gaps.

[00:03:47]Ultimately, with cuttingedge materials, the linerless composite tank is one of the keys to making a single-stage orbit vehicle viable. And the rotating detonation aerospike engine would be very complimentary to this type of vehicle. That also brings us to a significant design challenge of a rotating detonation engine. Instead of a regular rocket engine that just burns fuel, this type of engine's utilizing a controlled explosion. And these shock waves travel at supersonic speeds around the chamber. So when you combine this with an aerospike, you have to have something that is able to cool the engine, but you have to have a material that can handle this extreme pressure.

[00:04:29]Luckily, we have technologies today that is making this engine a possibility. For one, we have computational fluid dynamics, and it's basically just testing the engine in virtual reality.

[00:04:40]This is a really good tool because you can actually test some variables without even building the prototype, which can save you a lot of money. Another critical technology that is emerging are computational engineering models. Leap71 Noron is leading this race because it's able to incorporate thermal models, fluid dynamics, and manufacturing rules.

[00:05:00]And this is why we see very strange almost alien-like designs in aerospike engines. More specifically, it can design internal cooling channels that flood the central spike with liquid oxygen and the outer chamber with methane. And before this was very challenging for a human to draft, let alone test this in simulation. It was kind of funny talking about this in the early days because they were just concepts. But now it can be combined with 3D metal printing. And this is where we're actually seeing real prototypes actually being built. Yet, these prototypes have only ran for a few seconds and they still have a ways to go to be utilized in a reusable rocket. But this is a very rapidly changing field.

[00:05:43]And Astrobotic just revealed a rotating detonation engine with an aerospike that actually ran for over 300 seconds continuously. And that's believed to have set a record as well. They have actually built several prototypes that produce 4,000 lb of thrust. and it makes it one of the most powerful variants that has been tested to date. Once again, this engine is 3D printed, but it's believed to have variable paracity, meaning one single 3D printed piece can be solid for strength in one area and be a little bit porous for cooling in others. It also exemplifies the importance of 3D printing because you can have monolithic builds which can handle these extreme conditions.

[00:06:22]Combined with innovations in alloys such as DRX810, we can develop materials that can handle these temperatures and pressures a lot better than just regular materials. In conclusion, a rotating detonation rocket engine has excellent energy density and efficiency. It can provide up to 25% more thrust than a regular rocket engine. And if it can be scaled up, combined with an aeros spike, it can be utilized in a single staged orbit vehicle. But this would be the absolute performance limitation on chemical rocketry. And in order to break the rules, we have to come up with a different type of propulsion system. But more importantly, I would like to know what you think. So please leave a comment, like the video if you enjoyed it, and also make sure to subscribe to my channel.