A Study on Methods for Optimizing Thrust and Thermal Efficiency in Rocket Engines

Nowadays, the global commercial space industry is developing rapidly; deep-space exploration missions keep increasing year by year, and countries around the world are speeding up the construction of both manned and unmanned space stations; rocket engines are the necessary core components of all space launch systems, and they play a very key role in the whole space launch process.Their two basic performance indicators, thrust and thermal efficiency, directly determine the payload capacity of spacecraft, affect the overall cost of each launch mission, and define the farthest reach that deep-space exploration can achieve.This paper sorts out and reviews relevant studies both at home and abroad, and summarizes the latest research progress on optimizing rocket engine thrust and thermal efficiency; it introduces three typical propulsion systems, which are variable specific impulse magnetic plasma engines, air-turbine rocket engines, and liquid oxygen/methane rocket engines, explaining their basic technical principles, main performance strengths and possible future application scenarios; it also analyzes three core efficiency modules, including combustion efficiency, thermodynamic cycle efficiency and nozzle efficiency, sums up the inner influence rules of key structural design parameters on overall thermal efficiency, and makes a quantitative comparison of the efficiency gaps between different thermodynamic cycle structures.