RPA - Design Tool for Liquid Rocket Engine Analysis

Quick Start

The Sun's technology Java Web Start is used for the launching the program. All required libraries for the MS Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, or Apple Mac OS X platforms will be downloaded and installed automatically. The file RPA web start can also be used as a desktop shortcut, making launching the Web-deployed RPA application similar to launching a native applications, and permitting the off-line operation of the program.

Description

The program calculates chemical equilibrium compositions from the wide range of propellant components, determines thermodynamic properties for the reaction products, and calculates the theoretical rocket performance. The results of thermodynamics calculation can also be used to analyze and design combustion chambers, gas generators and preburners of the liquid-propellant rocket engines.

The tool allows:

• to determine the equilibrium composition for adiabatic, isenthalpic combustion of two or more reactants
• to determine the composition for monopropellant decomposition
• to calculate the isentropic quasi-one-dimensional nozzle flow for both shifting and frozen flow model

The current version of the program utilizes the Nasa Lewis/Glenn Thermodynamic Database developed by Bonnie J. McBride и Sanford Gordon.

For more detailed information on theoretical principles used in the program see RPA: Design Tool for Liquid Rocket Engine Analysis.

Version labelled as 0.96 is a beta version of 1.0.

System Requirements

• Sun Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6
  The program is written in Java in order to allow the execution on different operating systems and different hardware platforms.
• SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit
  SWT is a widget toolkit for Java designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented. In contrary to other analogous Java libraries, SWT enforces a one-to-one mapping between Java native methods and operating system calls. That restricts the portability of the Java application, but increases its performance.

  Because SWT depends on operating system and hardware platform, one need to download the appropriate version of the library from the link above. SWT v.3.4 is available for the following platforms: Windows, Windows (x86_64), Linux (x86/GTK 2), Linux (x86_64/GTK 2), Linux (s390/GTK 2), Linux (s390x/GTK 2), Linux (x86/Motif), Linux (PPC/GTK 2), Solaris 10 (SPARC/GTK 2), HP-UX (IA64_32/Motif), AIX (PPC/Motif) и Mac OS X (Mac/Carbon).

Installation and Running

Launching from web site using Java Web Start

• Install Sun Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6.
  Download from the link above the installation package that corresponds to your platform (the size of file is approx. 14-16 MB depending on platform). Start the installation package and follow its instructions.
• Launch the program, clicking on the following link: RPA web start. All required libraries for the MS Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, or Apple Mac OS X platforms will be downloaded and installed automatically.
  The file RPA web start can also be stored on a local hard disc and used as a desktop shortcut, making launching the Web-deployed RPA application similar to launching a native applications, and permitting the off-line operation of the program. On subsequent launching of the program, Web Start will contact the server to see if any of the required resources have been updated. If so, it will automatically download and update corresponding items.

  See Sun Java Web Start to learn more about key features and benefits of using the Web-deployed applications.

Manual installation and launching from local hard disc

• Install Sun Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6.
  Download from the link above the installation package that corresponds to your platform (the size of file is approx. 14-16 MB depending on platform). Start the installation package and follow its instructions.
• Download the archived package containing compiled RPA program and SWT library that corresponds to your platform:
  
  • rpa-linux-x86.tar.gz for Linux (x86/GTK 2)
  • rpa-linux-x86-64.tar.gz for Linux (x86-64/GTK 2)
  • rpa-windows-x86.zip for MS Windows
  • rpa-windows-x86-64.zip for MS Windows (x86-64)
  • rpa-solaris-sparc.tar.gz for Sun Solaris (sparc)
  • rpa-macosx.tar.gz for Apple Mac OS X
  • rpa-other.zip for other platforms
    
    Warning! The last package does not contain required SWT library! You need to download the complete SWT distribution (the size of file is approx. 5 MB), extract the file swt.jar and copy it to the RPA installation directory.
• Extract files from the archived package into installation directory.
• Start the program, executing the command:
  rpa.bat (on Windows) or
  rpa.sh (on Linux, Solaris, or Mac OS X).

  The program implements multilingual user interface and supports following languages: English, German and Russian. The default language depends on the system locale.

  To force the specific language to be used for the user interface, start the program as follows:
  rpa_en.bat or rpa_en.sh (for English),
  rpa_de.bat or rpa_de.sh (for German),
  rpa_ru.bat or rpa_ru.sh (for Russian).
  

Further Links

1. Болгарский А.В., Мухачев Г.А., Щуки В.К. Термодинамика и теплопередача. Учебн. для вузов. Изд. 2-е, перераб. и доп. — М., «Высш. Школа», 1975.
2. Gordon, S. and McBride, B.J. Computer Program for Calculation of Complex Chemical Equilibrium Compositions and Applications. NASA Reference Publication 1311, Oct. 1994.
3. The NASA Computer program CEA2 (Chemical Equilibrium with Applications 2)
4. Burcat, A. and Ruscic, B. Third Millennium Ideal Gas and Condensed Phase Thermochemical Database for Combustion with Updates from Active Thermochemical Tables. Technion/Argonne National Laboratory. Sep. 2005