Rocket Propulsion Elements

by George P. Sutton, Oscar Biblarz

Publisher: Wiley-Interscience
ISBN: 0470080248

Check price @ amazon.com , amazon.ca , amazon.co.uk

Book Description

Aerospace Engineering/Mechanical Engineering

For sixty years, Sutton's Rocket Propulsion Elements has been regarded as the single most authoritative sourcebook on rocket propulsion technology. As with the previous edition, coauthored with Oscar Biblarz, the Eighth Edition of Rocket Propulsion Elements offers a thorough introduction to basic principles of rocket propulsion for guided missiles, space flight, or satellite flight. It describes the physical mechanisms and designs for various types of rockets' and provides an understanding of how rocket propulsion is applied to flying vehicles.

Updated and strengthened throughout, the Eighth Edition explores:

• The fundamentals of rocket propulsion, its essential technologies, and its key design rationale
• The various types of rocket propulsion systems, physical phenomena, and essential relationships
• The latest advances in the field such as changes in materials, systems design, propellants, applications, and manufacturing technologies, with a separate new chapter devoted to turbopumps
• Liquid propellant rocket engines and solid propellant rocket motors, the two most prevalent of the rocket propulsion systems, with in-depth consideration of advances in hybrid rockets and electrical space propulsion

Comprehensive and coherently organized, this seminal text guides readers evenhandedly through the complex factors that shape rocket propulsion, with both theory and practical design considerations. Professional engineers in the aerospace and defense industries as well as students in mechanical and aerospace engineering will find this updated classic indispensable for its scope of coverage and utility.

From Book News, Inc.

Introduces the basic principles of rocket propulsion technology, liquid rocket engines, solid rocket motors, electric propulsion, and thrust vector control, with applications to space flight, satellite flight, and missiles.

Book Info

A comprehensive and coherently organized text on the factors that shape rocket propulsion, considering both theory and practical design. Includes the most current information on engine structures, nozzle theory, gas properties, thrust chambers, and launch vehicles.

Customer Reviews

This is the definitive "text book" for the subject of rocket propulsion. Its coverage of the subject is both broad and detailed. Probably a third of the book can be understood with no more than high school level physics and mathematics. The remainder requires some exposure to undergraduate level mechanical engineering, mathematics and physics, e.g. integral calculus, thermodynamics, etc. This book is in its 7th edition and it shows. The authors have a clean, precise, almost mechanical writing style that you would expect in a highly evolved technical work of this type. I do have one minor bone to pick with this book. The authors have clearly spent their lives doing rocketry in the mega million dollar world of NASA, General Dynamics, etc. Most of the graphs and diagrams emphasis big, big, rockets, e.g. graphs focusing on thrust chambers that operate at 5000 p.s.i. I suspect that most readers are either university students or individuals involved in experimental rocketry. Those that fall into the later category might benefit from better coverage of rocketry done with less exotic materials, fuels, and operating parameters. That minor weakness aside, this book covers in its 700 or so pages, everything that has been learned in the field of rocketry in the last 70 years and it presents this material at a fairly detailed technical level. It is therefore the book against which all others in the field will be judged.

The seventh edition of this book is absolutely amazing!!! It presents the material in a clear and concise manner without losing the reader. This book provides up to date information about every type of rocket propulsion system from solids and liquids, to hybrids and exotics. It also includes sections on design and trade studies for different systems. Of particular interest to me were the sections on hybrid propulsion and liquid engine injector design. This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in rocket propulsion design and analysis! 5 stars indeed!!!!!

This is the best book on rocket propulsion that I have seen. The reading is smooth and the jargon is kept to a simple amount to understand with out being a rocket scientist. Diagrams and charts are excellent in explaining what the author is talking about. Author keeps it simple for all!!

This book is wonderful for non-specialists, you can study it at home and learn a lot. Try this to start in the field of amateur rocketry. Highly recommended!!!

It is hard to believe that a technical book could keep me up until 2 in the morning, but this one sure did. The basic principles of rocket science are not at all confusing, nor are they incomprehensible, when presented in this manner. The authors really want to teach, not just show off their knowledge, and this book has reached that goal. I actually understand what the rocket scientist is doing, what they are up against, and why it takes multitudes of experiments, trials, and special materials to take a payload to space. The math is basic, yet encompassing, and anyone with a high school education can understand "THE" esoteric subject of our times. Authors Biblarz and Sutton are brilliant educators.

It is always a pleasure to find a comprehensive overview of a field that can be understood by a non-specialist. I cannot testify as to how useful Rocket Propulsion Elements would be to an aerospace engineer, but for a technically inclined amateur like me it is a wonderful book. One of the things I like best about it is that it mixes theory with practical examples. It give a clear idea not only of the principles of rocket propulsion ,but also of the current state of the art. I was expecting this for the field of chemical rocketry, but I was delighted to find explanations of more obscure technologies, such as electric rocket of various types. I only wish that there were books this good in every field.