What is it about?
The design of the autophage engine - the name comes from the Latin word for ‘self-eating’ - has several potential advantages over conventional rocket designs. The engine works by using waste heat from combustion to sequentially melt its own plastic fuselage as it fires. The molten plastic is fed into the engine’s combustion chamber as additional fuel to burn alongside its regular liquid propellants.
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Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash
Why is it important?
An autophage vehicle would require less propellant in onboard tanks, and the mass freed up could be allocated to payload instead. Overall, the greater efficiency could help autophage rockets take a greater payload into space compared to a conventional rocket of the same mass. They could, for example, take tiny ‘nanosatellites’ into space directly without having to share space on more expensive conventionally-fueled rockets.
Perspectives
For our team, this was an exciting research project to work on to demonstrate a concept that had been theorized since the 1930s but never before successfully built. We are excited to see so many people discussing our work and themselves getting excited about other state-of-the-art research in space propulsion. Ad Astra.
Krzysztof Bzdyk
University of Glasgow
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Investigation of the Operating Parameters and Performance of an Autophage, Hybrid Rocket Propulsion System, January 2024, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2024-1604.
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