Thermal stress analysis of a solid rocket motor nozzle throat insert using finite element method

A finite element formulation is developed for the analysis of axisymmetric, transient, anisotropic heat conduction problem with the temperature dependant thermo-physical material properties of a graphite throat nozzle for the solid rocket motor. A standard Galerkin method using linear triangular element is employed for the space discretization. The time integration is done using an implicit time marching scheme of the first order differential equation. The convective heat transfer coefficient is calculated using the Bartz correlation. A thermal stress analysis is also carried out on the graphite throat of the nozzle using finite element method with two degrees of freedom. The developed computer codes for this purpose are validated with known analytical solution and available ANSYS code.