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.
Our Approach to Heat Transfer
This’ll be the first time OTRA has posted an update on our website! Woohoo! Today I’d like to give a tidbit into where we are at in engine design. I won’t be covering everything we have, but I’d like to share a bit of how we approached the cooling and stresses in the combustion chamber. …