Date of Award

Fall 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Travis Knight

Abstract

This thesis presents the development of a reduced-order simulator for a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system, designed to capture the key thermo-fluid and performance characteristics of such systems while maintaining computational efficiency. The primary objective of this work is to develop and demonstrate a modular simulation framework capable of modeling the coupled physics of an NTP reactor, nozzle, and orbital transfer system. The simulator integrates a reduced-order thermal-fluid model of the reactor, a simplified nozzle model, and an orbital transfer model, providing a comprehensive yet computationally efficient representation of the propulsion process. By employing reduced-order modeling techniques, the simulator achieves near real-time performance while preserving sufficient accuracy in predicting temperature distributions, propellant heating, thrust generation, and overall system efficiency. This approach significantly reduces the computational cost compared to conventional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses, enabling rapid evaluation of design parameters and mission scenarios. The results demonstrate that the reduced-order models reproduce expected thermal and fluid dynamic behavior with good agreement to benchmark data. The simulator provides an effective platform for preliminary design studies, system optimization, and educational demonstration of nuclear thermal propulsion principles. Its modular structure allows future integration of more advanced physics and control algorithms. Overall, this work contributes a flexible and efficient tool for NTP system analysis, bridging the gap between high-fidelity CFD simulations and simplified analytical models.

Rights

© 2025, Jackson Taylor Zazzaro

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