The historical HW2 rocket was a liquid propulsion rocket, designed by the German rocket pioneer Johannes Winkler in 1932. With this rocket, Winkler tried to reach a much higher altitude than with his first model, the HW1, which was the first liquid propulsion rocket in Europe and reached an altitude of 60 meters. Because of technical problems, the HW2 exploded immediately after the launch on October 6th in 1932 [1] [2].
To estimate the performance of this historical liquid propulsion rocket its maximum flight altitude was computed with the use of CFD. The equation of the vertical flight trajectory was solved numerically, with the classical Runge-Kutta method. For the computation of the vertical trajectory standard atmospheric conditions were considered. To determine the thrust and the drag of the rocket, the Navier-Stokes equations were solved with the commercial CFD solver Star-CCM+ from Siemens PLM Software. The rocket hull and the rocket engine were first simulated independently for different Mach-numbers and atmospheric flight conditions. Finally the complete rocket with running rocket engine was also computed in atmospheric flight conditions. These results were compared with the standalone simulations of the rocket drag without the running rocket engine and with the simulation of the rocket engine alone. The results are shown and analyzed in detail in this work.
