LEAP 71 Hot-Fires Advanced Aerospike Rocket Engine Designed by AI (newatlas.com) 24
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: The Dubai-based startup LEAP71, focused on using AI software to quickly develop rocket engine designs it can then 3D print, has successfully test fired a prototype aerospike engine on December 18, 2024 during a static fire test campaign conducted in the United Kingdom.
Along the way they tackled a problem with bell-shaped rocket nozzles, writes New Atlas. "A rocket that works very well on liftoff will work less well as it rises in the atmosphere and the air pressure decreases. This is why second- and third-stage rocket engines are different from those of the first stage." Ideally, engineers want an engine that can adjust itself automatically to changes in air pressure. An aerospike does this by shaping the engine into a spike or plug with a curve like that of the inside of a rocket bell. As the combustion gases flow from the engine over the spike, the curve acts as one side of the bell and the surrounding air as the outside curve. As the air pressure changes, so does the shape of the virtual bell. There have been a number of aerospike engines developed since the 1950s and one has actually gone airborne, but there's still a long way to go when it comes to turning a promising idea into a practical space engine.
LEAP 71's contribution to the effort is to apply its Noyron Large Computational Engineering Model to the problem. It's an AI programmed and trained by aerospace experts to take a given set of input parameters and use them to create a design that meets those parameters by inferring physical interactions of various factors, including thermal behaviors and projected performance. The results of this are then fed back into the AI model to fine tune it as it presents computed performance parameters, the geometry of the engine, the parameters of the manufacturing process, and other details.
"Despite their clear advantages, Aerospikes are not used in space access today," LEAP 71's co-founder said in a statement. "We want to change that. Noyron allows us to radically cut the time we need to re-engineer and iterate after a test and enables us to converge rapidly on an optimal design."
Aerospikes "are more compact and significantly more efficient across various atmospheric pressures, including the vacuum of space," the company said this week — announcing the successful hot-firing of their Aerospike engine, and calling it "one of the most advanced and elusive rocket engines ever created..." By leveraging the power of Noyron's computational AI, the thruster was developed in a matter of weeks, manufactured as a monolithic piece of copper through industrial 3D printing, and put on the test stand, where it worked successfully on the first attempt...
The Aerospike was fired on December 18th, 2024, as part of a four-engines-in-four-days campaign conducted by LEAPâ71 at Airborne Engineering in Westcott, UK. The company will process the collected data to fine-tune Noyron for the next iteration of engines and continue testing in 2025, with the goal of making Aerospikes a viable option for modern spacecraft.
Along the way they tackled a problem with bell-shaped rocket nozzles, writes New Atlas. "A rocket that works very well on liftoff will work less well as it rises in the atmosphere and the air pressure decreases. This is why second- and third-stage rocket engines are different from those of the first stage." Ideally, engineers want an engine that can adjust itself automatically to changes in air pressure. An aerospike does this by shaping the engine into a spike or plug with a curve like that of the inside of a rocket bell. As the combustion gases flow from the engine over the spike, the curve acts as one side of the bell and the surrounding air as the outside curve. As the air pressure changes, so does the shape of the virtual bell. There have been a number of aerospike engines developed since the 1950s and one has actually gone airborne, but there's still a long way to go when it comes to turning a promising idea into a practical space engine.
LEAP 71's contribution to the effort is to apply its Noyron Large Computational Engineering Model to the problem. It's an AI programmed and trained by aerospace experts to take a given set of input parameters and use them to create a design that meets those parameters by inferring physical interactions of various factors, including thermal behaviors and projected performance. The results of this are then fed back into the AI model to fine tune it as it presents computed performance parameters, the geometry of the engine, the parameters of the manufacturing process, and other details.
"Despite their clear advantages, Aerospikes are not used in space access today," LEAP 71's co-founder said in a statement. "We want to change that. Noyron allows us to radically cut the time we need to re-engineer and iterate after a test and enables us to converge rapidly on an optimal design."
Aerospikes "are more compact and significantly more efficient across various atmospheric pressures, including the vacuum of space," the company said this week — announcing the successful hot-firing of their Aerospike engine, and calling it "one of the most advanced and elusive rocket engines ever created..." By leveraging the power of Noyron's computational AI, the thruster was developed in a matter of weeks, manufactured as a monolithic piece of copper through industrial 3D printing, and put on the test stand, where it worked successfully on the first attempt...
The Aerospike was fired on December 18th, 2024, as part of a four-engines-in-four-days campaign conducted by LEAPâ71 at Airborne Engineering in Westcott, UK. The company will process the collected data to fine-tune Noyron for the next iteration of engines and continue testing in 2025, with the goal of making Aerospikes a viable option for modern spacecraft.
Question (Score:2)
Will this increase the efficiency of the burn? By that I mean, using a conventional engine design, X amount of fuel is used to lift the rocket and payload. Does this design use less fuel to lift the same rocket and payload? Is there an increase in thrust because of the design?
Answer (Score:2)
As TFA says an aerospike's effective nozzle shape is adaptable in flight and therefore the efficiency of the nozzle can be optimal for a range of densities and speeds, whereas a conventional rocket nozzle has to be optimised for one flight regime only.
OTOH an aerospike engine is heavier and more complicated, so there's a tradeoff between brute force and theoretical efficiency.
Re: Answer (Score:2)
While I havenâ(TM)t looked in a while I thought the biggest issue isnâ(TM)t the design of the aerospike but cooling it. You need active cooling of the spike to prevent it from melting.
A solvable problem as part of the design. But a major issue
Re: (Score:2)
From the linked article...
Lissner, CEO and Co-Founder of LEAP71, stated: “We were able to extend Noyron’s physics to deal with the unique complexity of this engine type. The spike is cooled by intricate cooling channels flooded by cryogenic oxygen, whereas the outside of the chamber is cooled by the kerosene fuel. I am very encouraged by the results of this test, as virtually everything on the engine was novel and untested. It’s a great validation of our physics-driven approach to computat
Re: Answer (Score:3)
You need active cooling of a DeLeval nozzle too. The actual issue is that your engineâ(TM)s throat needs to be ring shaped, and needs to provide gasses evenly all around the circle. That in theory could be accomplished with one large ring shaped combustion chamber, but keeping the combustion even all around the chamber would be extremely difficult. In practice, such engines have used multiple combustion chambers feeding different points around the nozzle. Either solution though involves a larger, an
Ultimately pointless (Score:5, Informative)
Will this increase the efficiency of the burn? By that I mean, using a conventional engine design, X amount of fuel is used to lift the rocket and payload. Does this design use less fuel to lift the same rocket and payload? Is there an increase in thrust because of the design?
Pressure of the atmosphere on the thrust stream the rocket engine produces changes and reduces the efficiency of the engine when it reaches space. You can have the same engine on the ground however the bell size has to increase the further out of the atmosphere you go to maintain the efficiency. Engines bells are also expensive.
Tim Dodd's Everyday Astronaut channel has a great video analyzing Aerospike Engines [youtube.com] that goes into great detail about these engines. The TL;DW answer is that they are ultimately only useful for a single stage to orbit vehicle which are essentially obsolete with perfected reusable boosters that solve the issue of having to have different size engine bells.
It's a great video and really goes into the whys and how of Aerospike engines.
Re: (Score:2)
Tim Dodd's Everyday Astronaut channel has a great video analyzing Aerospike Engines [youtube.com] that goes into great detail about these engines. The TL;DW answer is that they are ultimately only useful for a single stage to orbit vehicle which are essentially obsolete with perfected reusable boosters that solve the issue of having to have different size engine bells.
It is an excellent video, with lots of great detail, but the conclusions don't quite follow, IMO.
Aerospike engines have the potential to provide maximum efficiency at every altitude, whereas using engines with fixed bell sizes means you get max efficiency only at specific altitudes. Multi-stage rockets with reuseable boosters address most of the resulting inefficiency, but aerospikes can theoretically do better, at least until the rocket reaches vacuum (vacuum-optimized bells are better than aerospikes in
Not entirely pointless (Score:1)
SSTOs still have some advantages over landable/resuable staged boosters. Most people think the idea of propulsive landing is unlikely to be considered safe enough for a crewed vehicle, whereas an SSTO spaceplane has a lot more backup/abort options since it glides to a runway. That SSTO also has a theoretical faster turnaround time as well, since it also takes off horizontally from a runway. No need to restack your rocket, you don't need an expensive Starship-style launch pad and water deluge system, etc.
Lol (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The time to describe was to design the rocket, not to fabricate it.
Re: Lol (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
A tool that would take an input from AI and run the simulation for it. Except not really either since the CFDs would take forever to run making iterating through a simulation insanely computationally complex.
You don't seem to understand what is being done here. No an aerospace engineer would not take two days to iterate through many thousands of simulations to come up with an ideal shape. That's why we have trained models for. AI models are used to predict which designs will perform best in simulation, not
Re: (Score:2)
This gets me curious if the Ansys model or Noyron is in the lead right now. Ansys has been in the industry a long time, and it wouldn't be surprising for them to be figuring out new generations of rockets.
Re: Lol (Score:2)
Ah right, the fact that you can design *an* aerospike in that time means that a tool for designing a *better* aerospike is useless. Wait, no, these are two entirely unrelated facts.
Re: (Score:2)
hrm?
Why haven't any of them designed a SSTO aerospike in Ansys in two days then?
What are you saying here?
Did you even look at the pictures?
https://leap71.com/2024/12/23/... [leap71.com]
Re: (Score:2)
From TFA:
The Aerospike was printed using a Laser Powder Bed Fusion process by industrial partner Aconity3D with an advanced aerospace copper alloy (CuCrZr). After it was cleaned of excess copper powder by Solukon, it underwent heat treatment at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology.
How long would that part of the process take your mythical "1 aerospace engineer"? Somehow it seems like it would be more than two days.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you know they're working for Dubai? I'm not saying they aren't, but in many places it is possible for companies to work purely for their own ends, without benefiting the nation. Although this is rare in aerospace, most nations want those companies to contribute something considering how valuable they are militarily.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, the last sixty countries that Dubai overthrew are doing terribly. One just lost 600,000 soldiers.
Re: Dubai, China, Russia etc. (Score:2)
So, what's the story? (Score:2)
So... (Score:2)
A company, which claims expertise in certain software development posts a sales video hyping that software?
Cool story, bros, thanks.
Consumption rate of engine? (Score:2)