Miniature Extendable Nozzles or actuating nozzles for improved ISP of DACS thrusters

ASI is pleased to team with ATK to present a novel concept for enabling large nozzle area ratio increases for future solid divert and attitude control system (SDACS) valves/thrusters. The proposed effort will demonstrate feasibility of this advanced concept through a thorough design study that includes mechanical layout and packaging, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of nozzle performance and a kill vehicle performance comparison. We anticipate those analyses will show quite significant kill vehicle divert performance increase. To support that conclusion for our proposal, we completed a survey of state of the art in extendible nozzles and used the relative performance rankings we found in the literature to determine whether our solution represents a significant advance in state of the art. That comparison shows that our proposed solution enables a two- to five-fold increase in area ratio (for the same length) over a fixed bell nozzle, and a 40% to 100% increase in area ratio over state-of-the-art extendible nozzles. Weight and reliability impacts are minimal.