🚧 Status: ongoing — actively being developed, not a finished/archived project. Last major milestone: written technical report, August 2026.
A design and analysis project for a throttleable pintle injector (the coaxial, variable-area injector used in engines like the Apollo LM descent stage and SpaceX's Merlin), sized for a LOX/LCH4 propellant pair. Work spans analytical feasibility studies, a spiral-vane manifold design, SolidWorks CAD, and a formal writeup.
Author: Prathit Sharma (B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Petroleum and Energy)
docs/ Written deliverables: proposal, technical report (LaTeX source + PDF),
SolidWorks design guide, and reference images used while designing parts
analysis/ MATLAB feasibility scripts + CEA run data, and working notes/conversation logs
cad/
native/ SolidWorks source files (.SLDPRT/.SLDASM) — not yet checked in, see note below
exports/ Neutral .step exports of the current CAD, importable into any CAD package
references/ Citations for the papers/textbooks that informed this design (see note below)
- Proposal
- Analytical feasibility study (spiral-vane manifold)
- Technical report (Aug 2026)
- Detailed CAD (native SolidWorks files not yet in this repo)
- Prototype / manufacturing
- Test data
See docs/report/README.md for how to build main.tex, or just open docs/report/main_preview.pdf for a pre-built copy.
Several PDFs that informed this design — journal papers, a thesis, and the Rocket Propulsion Elements textbook — are not committed here since they're someone else's copyrighted work. references/bibliography.md lists full citations instead; the actual files are kept locally and are git-ignored.
Code (the MATLAB scripts under analysis/matlab/) is released under the MIT License — see that file.
Everything else in this repository — the report, design guide, proposal, images, and CAD files — is © Prathit Sharma and remains all rights reserved unless stated otherwise. Feel free to read/cite it, but don't redistribute or reuse it without asking first.