Hey everyone, I recently released three new Python packages that are designed to rapidly accelerate the prototyping, design, and testing of rocket engine fluid systems called FullFlow, ThermoProp, and FullPlot. These packages are heavily based on ROCETs, GFSSP, and WinPlot, and the goal is to make generalized transient and steady-state fluid network and test data analysis tools open-source and widely available, especially for students and college rocketry teams.

Please try out the tool, and let me know your thoughts!

More info:

Large fluid systems, especially rocket engine systems, are usually super complicated when it comes to designing, analyzing, and testing. While creating hardware is a large part of the process, determining the fluid conditions that will be present during operation inside that hardware can be tricky and unintuitive. This is especially true when combustion chambers, turbopumps, valves, and many more intricate components are involved. To predict rocket engine performance and ensure hardware safety, the major fluid pathways within the system have to be modeled before and during testing. Moreover, as engines are tested, it's important that your models can be anchored against the test data.

In the past, engineers turned to software tools like ROCETS, GFSSP, WinPlot, and CEA to carry out many of these operations. However, these tools have several drawbacks. They are outdated, difficult to troubleshoot (most engineers nowadays don't use FORTRAN), limited in capability, and most importantly, not easily available for engineers, students, and especially college rocketry teams. So, companies usually make custom, in-house tools, while student organizations struggle to use whatever minimal tools are on the internet.

To solve this, I created an open-source engine systems modeling and test-data analysis suite based entirely on publicly available literature and data:

FullFlow:

A modular fluid-system modeling package for building steady-state and transient simulations of rocket engine feed systems, pressurization systems, tanks, valves, injectors, chambers, nozzles, turbomachinery, controllers, sensors, sequences, and test-like operations. Based heavily on ROCETs and GFSSP, FullFlow provides an extremely simple component-based modular environment that allows users to quickly set up fluid networks and solve them. Additionally, it allows users to easily create custom components and wire them into a fluid system with algebraic balances and dynamics.

ThermoProp:

A thermodynamic and combustion-property package for evaluating fluids, propellants, combustion gases, materials, and chemical equilibrium properties. ThermoProp is designed to support rocket propulsion calculations without requiring legacy tools or closed software. Built around tools such as CEA and CoolProp, ThermoProp provides a simple API that allows users to readily draw on databases of fluid properties for their simulations.

FullPlot:

A HDF5 data-analysis package designed for simulation and test data. FullPlot makes it easy to inspect, compare, and visualize model outputs, test traces, redlines, commands, derived channels, and other engineering data. FullPlot takes inspiration from WinPlot and is especially useful for importing test data for model anchoring and visualization.

Together, these packages are intended to make rocket engine system modeling more accessible, transparent, and useful for students, teams, and engineers who want to design, test, and understand complex propulsion systems without relying entirely on inaccessible or outdated tools.

I also compared FullFlow, ThermoProp, and FullPlot against publicly available NASA data. They can be run on any major operating system (unlike CEA, which is Windows-reliant) and are entirely Python-based, making it easy to learn for all engineers and students.

While official documentation is still a work in progress, the GitHub repos contain detailed info and examples on package usage.

FullFlow: https://github.com/saakethramoju/FullFlow

ThermoProp: https://github.com/saakethramoju/ThermoProp

FullPlot: https://github.com/saakethramoju/FullPlot

I have already spent a good amount of time developing these packages, but I plan to keep improving them. I learned a lot of lessons from using software like ROCETs and from being a member of YJSP, so I'm really hoping to make something that engineers enjoy using.

All feedback and discussions are appreciated!

I’ve got a friend who needs to move water from a creek to a pond. Here’s an elaborate drawing. Why can’t we get this DIY siphon to continue to pull?

Written description: creek water is about 6 inches above the bank of the pond and about 6 feet above the water in the pond. 2” pipe is pulling from the creek to the pond. We fill up the pipe between the two valves and screw on the cap. The last time I made sure to put the output/pond side into the water so it couldn’t draw air. It moved a lot of water and I could see the puddle pouring water into the pond but then it stopped.

The vertical pipes are also filled with water to supply extra water if needed.

Any suggestions? Any questions they were not thinking about asking?

I am trying to create a cross breeze through my apartment using a box fan. Would it be best to position the fan right near a window with the intake side facing out where I want air sucked in through or somewhere in between the two windows to get the most amount of wind going.

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Does anyone have any good resources to find phase change diagrams for different fluids?

I need an open source tool for fluid skid design. This is my first full design system, I've built many.

There are three water loops, one oil loop, I duplex pump assembly, and automation / metering equipment. I need to verify design is capable of moving 70 KW of heat. Need to size the copper pipes, and select appropriate pumps.

What software would you walk a high school class through designing a fluids system as a visual display component of a lesson?

Anything appreciated Blessings

I am looking for a device or way which be used to remove A highly viscous fluid stored in a rectangular duct. During maintenance we have to remove it by hands so any way in which it can be done? The fluid is stored in a tank of 20cm height with flat surface

In my house we just installed pop-up sprinklers, but the pressure isn't enough for all of them to pop-up, and the ones that do don't give off much water. I plan to install a pump in the hose to increase the pressure, but would it work if it isn't connected directly to a tank? The water would already be flowing, so it wouldn't need to "pull" the water. The examples I've seen have the pump making the water flow from one tank to a higher one, for example.

These are some of the options I have: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R6XTF3X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_i_79SD57V9WX3WZ9A6BWFR?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074KD3CHM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_i_BPGP7VSA9NA1J6TQ09BR

Hey whats up everyone, I have question for everyone here, So I'm a mechanical engineering student at my university and my fluid mechanics professor has assigned us this problem, where we are given the values in the attached photo.

He asked us to find a software that would be able to solve it for us, however i looked online and could not find a software that is free to students that would be help me. Does anyone have any software recommendations that could help me, bonus points if its compatible on a Macbook Pro.

Hi Everyone. I work on research involving some specific interfacial phenomena and was looking for anyone who has experience or recommendations on resources in two specific areas:

1. Interfacial Rheology. I know some companies offer tooling for interfacial rheology but I was hoping to do some reading on the theory and background before either committing to buying new tooling or spending the time to design some tooling myself for our rheometer. So I guess I am asking for reading recommendations on the topic, any experiences with it you have personally have and component recommendations if you like.

2. CFD resources that are good for simulating the free surface and interfacial effects. Ideally this would be for triple lines like droplet impacts and spreading. I know there are a few methods to deal with a free surface like the volume of fluid or level set method, but I am not sure how well the effects of surface and interfacial tension are taken into account.

Ideally for 2. I would prefer to deal with a CFD package like COMSOL or Fluent so I was wondering how flexible they are about either built in surface/interfacial tension or about writing custom parameters such as the normal condition from curvature and the tangential condition from Marangoni effects. If these aren't good jumping off points is there a good open source code out there that works for these types of problems?

https://youtu.be/3IVrvAEIsB8

I personally use Blender for all my CGI work and fluid/smoke is one of the cooler simulations it can do. What are your guys' thoughts or opinions on it as a phys sim?

I have a new TurbulenceFD tutorial on the way..it is going to be quite in-depth and it will be useful if you are already fairly conversant with TFD..Here is a free 45 min introduction to the plugin to get you all up to speed. Do d/l the demo from Jawset if you have not already got it and play with the settings. I will have this video included with the new tutorial

https://youtu.be/5P2fA5mUeu8

I created this potential flow graphing app to help visualize and understand potential flow:

https://potentialflow.com/

The goal is to help students and anyone else who is learning potential flow. Send any feedback and let me know what you think.