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Isar Aerospace, a venture-backed New Space company, is seeking a Senior Propulsion Engineer to lead combustion device development for liquid rocket engines. You will serve as a senior technical contributor within the Combustion Devices team, responsible for high-fidelity combustion CFD analysis and the physical understanding required to design, assess, and mature combustion hardware including injectors, preburners, gas generators, ignition systems, and main combustion chambers.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own and execute end-to-end CFD analyses of reacting flows in liquid rocket engine combustion devices, from model definition and meshing through solution, verification, validation, and technical recommendation.
- Develop and apply premixed, partially premixed, and non-premixed combustion models for rocket-relevant propellant systems and operating conditions.
- Perform steady and transient RANS/URANS and scale-resolving simulations (LES) to investigate mixing, ignition, flame stabilization, combustion efficiency, and unsteady heat release.
- Model injector and chamber flows including atomization, evaporation, multiphase effects, real-gas behavior, conjugate heat transfer, and wall heat flux.
- Assess combustion stability and operability, including flame dynamics, pressure oscillations, injector coupling, acoustic interaction, chugging, and high-frequency instability risks.
- Build robust CFD workflows in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and Ansys Fluent, including geometry preparation, meshing strategies, solver setup, automation, post-processing, and model-quality documentation.
- Correlate simulations against component, cold-flow, and hot-fire test data; quantify model uncertainty and define predictive confidence limits.
- Translate CFD results into practical design decisions for combustion devices and interfaces.
- Collaborate with design, thermal, structures, materials, test, engine systems, and manufacturing teams to converge designs and resolve multidisciplinary issues.
- Plan analysis and validation activities, review colleague and partner work, and contribute to technical reviews, development roadmaps, and risk-retirement plans.
- Advance combustion modeling methods, engineering standards, and reusable best practices across the Propulsion organization.
Requirements:
- MSc or PhD in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, computational engineering, or comparable technical discipline.
- Typically 5–10 years of professional experience in rocket propulsion with substantial hands-on responsibility for combustion CFD and combustion-device development.
- Deep knowledge of fundamental combustion physics, chemical kinetics, flame structure, turbulence–chemistry interaction, ignition, and extinction phenomena.
- Demonstrated experience modeling reactive premixed and non-premixed flows under rocket-engine-relevant pressure, temperature, and mixture-ratio conditions.
- Advanced proficiency in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and/or Ansys Fluent for complex reacting-flow simulations; strong capability in meshing, solver selection, convergence assessment, and post-processing.
- Strong understanding of liquid rocket engine combustion devices, particularly injectors, preburners, gas generators, main combustion chambers, igniters, and associated thermal environments.
- Experience with CFD verification and validation, mesh and time-step sensitivity, uncertainty assessment, and correlation to experimental or hot-fire data.
- Proficiency in Python, MATLAB, or comparable language for automation, data reduction, and engineering analysis.
- Strong technical ownership, first-principles judgment, clear communication, and professional fluency in English.
Bonus Skills:
- Experience with LES or other scale-resolving methods for combustion dynamics, instability, and injector–chamber coupling.
- Experience with spray combustion, atomization, evaporation, real-fluid or real-gas thermodynamics, conjugate heat transfer, radiation, or reacting multiphase flows.
- Experience supporting rocket-engine hot-fire campaigns, defining instrumentation needs, and diagnosing combustion anomalies from test data.
- Experience developing custom models, user-defined functions, reduced chemical mechanisms, HPC workflows, or automated CFD pipelines.
