Mdthbs

Reading this question, instead of stacking two tanks, are there boosters where tanks are coaxial, (like a thermos bottle) having a trussed or tridimensional structure between inner and outer tank?

Basically a thick structural skin containing either fuel or oxidizer, and an inner hollow tank containing oxidizer or fuel.

If no, what are the main reasons?

An advantage to using a coaxial tank is you don't need to arrange plumbing to get the upper tanks contents to the engine.

A big problem with a coaxial tank is the large surface area between the two tanks, which means your propellants have to have compatible operational temperatures, or you need a lot of insulation.

In practice most rockets use cryogenic liquid oxygen these days, which would freeze kerosene, or would be frozen by liquid hydrogen. Propane, however, does complement LOx in such a setup. Orbex are building a booster using propane/LOx in concentric tanks

By matching the tank diameters to fuel mix, further simplification of a pressure fed engine is possible. This was used in the German Taifun surface-to-air missile and was copied in the Russian R-103 missile

For large rockets, you end up with more structure, not less.

If you keep the length and radius of the tankage the same, i.e. don't change the shape of the rocket, you still need the same amount of outside skin you always had, and the same (or more complex, i.e. heavier) ends.

You've replaced a separator between the tanks of area $pi r^2$ with a cylindrical separator of area $2 pi r L$, along with extra structural support to allow separate filling draining, etc. Since rockets tend to be much longer than wide, $L >> r$, you end up with more structure, hence weight.

Yes, this has been done, more or less:

This is the ESC-A upper stage of the Ariane 5 ECA. This stage reuses the engine and oxygen tank from the Ariane 4, combining it with a new hydrogen tank. The 'Bielles inter-réservoirs' are the trusses between the two. Ariane 5 has a much larger diameter than Ariane 4.

in this Cross-section you can see the hydrogen tank is dome-shaped:

This led to a very heavy construction, which makes this stage inefficient.

Coaxial tanks aren't popular because:

• they are heavier than tanks in tandem (on top of each other) because they contain more structure (instead of a horizontal dome, you have a vertical cylinder)


• they have more surface area where the two propellants share a wall. That is an issue if the two propellants have to be kept at different temperatures (like LOX/LH2 and LOX/RP-1): all that surface area needs to be insulated.

If you count a ring of individual tanks of fuel around a central oxidiser tank, then yes.

This is done in the Proton first stage, due to maximum transport size restrictions. The oxidizer tank was the largest diameter that could be carried on the railway (Baikonur is a long way from the sea.) So an additional six modules comprising one engine and one fuel tank each are prefabricated and installed on site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family)

NB: Another cluster design was used in the Saturn I, in order to be able to use existing components. An oxidizer tank from a Jupiter rocket was surrounded by 8 tanks from redstone rockets, 4 containing oxidiser and 4 containing fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I

other than the above, I can think of no good reason to use a concentric tank in tank design for a long, slim rocket. It increases the surface area between the two propellants, which frequently need to be kept at different temperatures.

An approximation to a concentric design has been used in very squat stages, like the Ariane upper stage mentioned in another answer. Spacex have proposed embedding small tanks of propellant for landing inside larger tanks for takeoff propellant in some BFR concepts, but that's not quite the same thing.