The Aerospike engine design has often raised challenges that have made its manufacturing complex. Aerospikes are more compact and significantly more efficient across various atmospheric pressures, including the vacuum of space. They forego the conventional bell-shaped nozzle by placing a spike in the center of a toroidal combustion chamber. Since it is surrounded by 3,500ºC hot exhaust gas, cooling the spike is an enormous challenge.
LEAP 71, an expert in Computational Engineering, has overcome these challenges as it announced it has successfully hot-fired an advanced and elusive rocket engine — The aerospike with 5,000 Newtons (1,100 lbf) of thrust, is powered by cryogenic liquid oxygen and kerosene.
The engine was generated autonomously by the latest generation of Noyron, the company’s Large Computational Engineering Model.
Josefine Lissner, CEO and Co-Founder of LEAP 71, 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 computational AI.”
From printing to engine testing
At the manufacturing level, the team relied on a Laser Powder Bed Fusion 3D printer provided by industrial partner Aconity3D and they used 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. The University of Sheffield’s Race 2 Space Team prepared the engine for the test site and provided active support during the campaign.
Lin Kayser, Co-Founder of LEAP 71, added: “Despite their clear advantages, Aerospikes are not used in space access today. 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.”
The Aerospike was fired on December 18th, 2024, as part of a four-engines-in-four-days campaign conducted by LEAP 71 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 this year.
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