AeroProp-X: An Open-Source, Self-Verifying Method-of-Characteristics Toolkit for Edge-Capable Rocket Nozzle Design and Aerothermodynamic Analysis

Abstract

The design of supersonic rocket nozzles by the Method of Characteristics is a mature discipline, yet the software that implements it is frequently either proprietary, heavyweight, or opaque, which limits reproducibility and classroom and field use. This paper presents AeroProp-X, an open-source, dependency-light toolkit that synthesizes shock-free minimum-length nozzle contours and evaluates their ideal aerothermodynamic performance entirely on commodity hardware without graphics acceleration or network access. The central contribution is methodological rather than physical: the planar characteristics solver is made self-verifying by exploiting an exact gas-dynamic invariant, namely that the computed exit wall height ratio must equal the isentropic area ratio at the design Mach number, so that every generated contour reports its own discretization error automatically. We describe the governing theory, the layered software architecture, and the synthesis algorithm, and we validate the implementation against analytic compressible-flow tables and against the expansion ratios of historical flight engines. The solver reproduces tabulated gas-dynamic quantities to table precision and converges to the exact area ratio with relative error below three parts in ten thousand, while remaining small enough to run interactively on an embedded-class processor. We argue that built-in verifiability, dependency minimalism, and explicit scoping of the ideal-flow assumptions together make the tool well suited to education, preliminary design, and reproducible research.

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