page_title: De Laval nozzle
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: De Laval nozzle / History
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Поперечное сечение реактивного двигателя РД-107 (Государственный музей истории космонавтики имени К. Э. Циолковского)
context_page_description: A de Laval nozzle is a tube that is pinched in the middle, making a carefully balanced, asymmetric hourglass shape. It is used to accelerate a hot, pressurized gas passing through it to a higher supersonic speed in the axial direction, by converting the heat energy of the flow into kinetic energy. Because of this, the nozzle is widely used in some types of steam turbines and rocket engine nozzles. It also sees use in supersonic jet engines.
  Similar flow properties have been applied to jet streams within astrophysics.
context_section_description: Giovanni Battista Venturi designed converging-diverging tubes known as Venturi tubes to experiment the effects in fluid pressure reduction while flowing through chokes (Venturi effect). German engineer and inventor Ernst Körting supposedly switched to a converging-diverging nozzle in his steam jet pumps by 1878 after using convergent nozzles but these nozzles remained a company secret. Later, Swedish engineer Gustaf De Laval applied his own converging diverging nozzle design for use on his impulse turbine in the year 1888.
  Laval's Convergent-Divergent nozzle was first applied in a rocket engine by Robert Goddard. Most modern rocket engines that employ hot gas combustion use de Laval nozzles.
caption: Longitudinal section of RD-107 rocket engine (Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics)
exif: {}