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 …
Some FEA
Team Pueo has been pretty delinquent with our blog posts and detailing our design, but here are some pretty pictures of FEA to tide you over. This FEA analysis lists our displacement at a loading of 2500lbf which should be about 8 times worse than our max direct loading in flight. This was a basic …
Test Stand Design Review
Introduction The 2017-2018 Talon team is responsible for all aspects of testing besides the design of the engine itself. To safely test engine designs, we are going to build an engine testing facility. It will consist of a test stand and propellant feed system mounted on a trailer, a control center at a safe distance …
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