The manufacture of the combustion chamber for White Dwarf has been finished this week. The cooling channels shown were created on a CNC mill in the Whittle Lab, Cambridge University Engineering Department. Below are photos of the original tube, and another of the CNCing taking place. The final part will be used in White Dwarf, …
On Monday, two lead engineers from Reaction Engines, one of CUSFs sponsors, came to CUED to talk to CUSF members and other students. They discussed the SABRE Demo engine, Applied Technologies and other spin-outs as well as showing us some hardware in-person! We would like to thank Piotr and Felix for giving up their time …
Reaction Engines Visit Cambridge University Engineering Department Read More »
White Dwarf is a project that CUSF are undertaking in order to experiment with liquid engines in preparation for the creation of White Giant, the engine that will take Griffin 1 to the Karman line. This smaller scale engine uses the same architecture for the most important components, allowing us to test the principles on …
Recovering Aquila from 150km altitude is not a simple problem to solve. Our dedicated recovery division has worked hard this year to design a hypersonic recovery system for Griffin 1, named Daedalus, after the engineer that created Icarus’ wings. Hemisflo Drogue The most complex element of the system is the hemisflo drogue. Our selection arose …
Griffin 1’s hypersonic recovery system – Daedalus Read More »
CamPyRoS (Cambridge Python Rocketry Simulator) is CUSF’s fully featured 6 degrees of freedom rocket trajectory simulator. This state of the art software has been worked on extensively by Jago Strong-Wright and Daniel Gibbons. and its features include: 6 degrees of freedom (3 translational, 3 rotational) Monte Carlo stochastic analysis Aerodynamic heating model Use of live …
Aquila, named after the genus of true eagles for it’s elegant bistable fin system, is the second stage of Griffin 1; CUSF’s first project which intends to pass the karman line. We are planning to launch Aquila in 2022 for testing. It will be powered by a Cesaroni Pro98, before it is integrated with Panthera …
Our cooling team have recently been working on Bamboo, a set of analysis and modelling tools that predicts the temperatures and thermal stresses across combustion chambers. It takes user specified parameters and produces outputs to assist with easy optimisation of designs. Bamboo outputs steady state temperature data, which can be used to predict stresses in …
Even though our hands-on work has been paused in the past 12 months, that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy here at CUSF. Here’s a quick round up of the projects that we are currently working on. Martlet 4 The 4th member of our Martlet series, this single stage rocket aims to reach an altitude …
