For our project, we want to achieve the following:
- Choked flow and stable combustion in a rocket engine
- Propellants are pump fed
- Pump is driven by a gas
- Ablative thrust chamber
The pump design phases are as follows:
Phase 1: Helium* Turbine and Water pump
Phase 2: Helium Turbine and Liquid Nitrogen pump
Phase 3: Gas Generator Development Water pump
Phase 4: Gas Generator and Liquid Nitrogen pump
Phase 5: Turbopump Design and Assembly
The decision was made based on the idea that our project needs to be as simple and specific as possible. Everyone on the blog has experience building an ablative thrust chamber and by getting rid of more complicated thrust chamber cooling options, we can focus on the turbopump. Furthermore, by taking smaller steps in our pump development, we can tune our calculators, learn basic pumping principles in a safer and more controllable environment, and have more time to gather information on gas generator ducting and turbine blade materials. The incremental testing campaign outlined above also allows us to generate a plethora of data points around both the turbine and pump for iterative design and testing in a hardware rich environment.
*Helium can be replaced with any inert gas in any phase
Our path forward in the next few days is:
Start Github for pump calculators, research what our final working gas will be for the gas generator - steam heat exchanger?? (and update shaft configuration), start designing our pump test stand (P&ID, wiring diagrams, BOM), post weekly progress updates on blogger.
Zach - Pump calculator
Ryan - Turbine research
Dylan - Test stand and steam research
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