MIT Rocket Team P9100 Static Fire

[eggplant]

I'm the chief engineer for the MIT rocket team this year. We're working on improving on our rocket from last year, Hermes I, which flew to 33kft over the California desert on a student built and designed 6" diameter O motor. We hope that Hermes II will exceed 80kft as we continue to build on our institutional knowledge. In order to reach that altitude, we had to redesign the propulsion system. Attempts to stretch last year's flight motor to a longer case went poorly, so we decided to re-engineer the motor using techniques that we felt would scale better. After spending all of our free time last semester developing a new propellant formula, selecting new insulation materials, and redesigning the propellant geometry, we had a new motor to try. Today we put it into the test stand and it worked perfectly! The data we collected matched our simulations almost exactly and all of the motor hardware components we expected to reuse are in good condition.

First the data:

Next the video:


Finally, some pictures:

The motor's propellant grains. The left two grains weigh around 30 pounds a piece!

Our new nozzle assembly.

We expect to fly it by early summer! I will start a thread in the research section if people are interested in hearing more about the design.

 

[BDB]

Looks great. Where did you test fire the motor?

And I’m sure lots of us would be interested in a thread about construction of a nozzle like that.

 

[mpitfield]

Congratulations on a successful test fire. The grain geometry looks interesting.