Hello everyone! Welcome new and returning OTRA club members to Fall 2022! First things first, we need to nail down a meeting time that works for us. Below is a link to a when2meet form, where you enter your name and make up a temporary password.After that, just click the time boxes that you are available for …
Welcome to the 2022-2023 Academic Year!
Hi everyone! We hope you all had a good summer! There are some exciting things on the horizon for our club, we have a new telescope project, upcoming IASC campaigns, and fun activities coming up! The main goal this year for the club is to get back on our feet from the hit we took …
Welcome to 2018-2019!
A New Year We here at OTRA are excited for the new year! We have 9 new senior projectors for the 2018-2019 academic year ready to dive into rocketry. Currently, they are working on taking the lessons learned from 2017-2018's flight rocket project, and pursuing a modular rocket for Spaceport America Cup. We hope to …
Material Selection
Choosing the right material for a rocket engine can be a bit of a challenge, especially when big players like NASA & SpaceX are using exotic materials such as Narloy-Z and Niobium alloys. We'd like to give you a run down of what we did for the Gizzard-1 Engine to perform analysis. You can download …
More From Mixture
This time with better info. So we experimented with pintile placement using a simple system just to get some initial data. In order to avoid things like combustion instability and to allow for film cooling, achieving a good fuel mixture is critical for the success of our project. Our first one has a clear gap …
Mixture Testing
Two quick takes from a mixture test of our injector design.
Entirely Gratuitous
But still fun. Here's a slow pan of the redesigned flight rocket. https://youtu.be/YmAoEE-PN4Q
A Simple Recovery Mechanism
So I spent some time re-inventing the wheel to create a light weight simple recovery mechanism. This model is missing a few elements, but basically our proposed recovery mechanism works as follows: A single actuator moves a pin through a tab mounted securely to the central pin. On the far side of the motion the …
Fuel System Evolution
In the past year, our oxidizer and fuel system has moved through six major revisions. Driving forces for change have included updated engine requirements, changes in fuel selection, safety concerns, as well as improvements compiled from team suggestions. Humble beginnings: Concept Sketch Our initial engineering sketch of the fuel system was used extensively to explain …
Pretty Picture Time
Here are some pretty pictures. The first is a mockup of a model I'm currently running CFD on to assess if and how a nosecone modeled on a Kingfisher beak might reduce our pressure drag. Japan Railways Group modeled their latest bullet trains off of this beak and saw some pretty impressive results which you …
Oregon Tech Rocketry and Aerospace 