Advances in Hybrid Rocket Technology and Related Analysis Methodologies

Dear Colleagues,

Once perceived as a niche technology, for about a decade, hybrid rockets have enjoyed renewed interest from both the propulsion technical community and industry. Hybrid motors can be used in practically all applications where a rocket is employed, but there are certain cases where they present a superior fit, such as sounding rockets, tactical missile systems, launch boosters and the emerging field of commercial space transportation. The novel space tourism business, indeed, will benefit from their safety and lower recurrent development costs. The number of researchers dealing with this subject has increased more and more all over the globe along with the launch of student sounding rockets.

The key research areas include systems to improve the slow fuel regression rate, such as the selection of paraffin-wax-based fuel casting, the enhancement of wall heat transfer with nonstandard oxidizer injection methods and/or fuel grain configurations, the effects of the addition of energetic ingredients into the fuel, the suppression of combustion instability, and the optimization of engine components.

In this scenario, a broad spectrum of internal ballistics reconstruction techniques, CFD and numerical simulation strategies, as well as experimental methods have been developed to predict or assess motor performance with success. However, the real challenge facing researchers is probably inseminating the hybrid culture to enable the widespread adoption of this technology, which is still hindered, not for technical reasons, but due to societal factors like the stereotype represented by the mature solid and liquid propellant rockets.

This Special Issue addresses a broad area of topics, welcoming papers that will make a substantial contribution to the state of the art on: (i) motor performance and related issues, (ii) internal ballistics modeling, (iii) applied computational fluid dynamics, (iv) combustion stability, (v) analytical and computational acoustics, (vi) the design of novel hybrid rocket motor concepts, and (vii) experimental methods.

Dr. Carmine Carmicino
Guest Editor

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