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 …
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 …
Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF) have successfully completed the first static firing of their custom hybrid rocket engine. Over last 18 months the team have been working tirelessly on Project Pulsar, designing and building the Pulsar engine from scratch, culminating in the successful test this week at Airborne Engineering Ltd’s test facility. Find more photographs of …
Cambridge University Spaceflight Fire Britain’s Largest Ever Nitrous Hybrid Rocket Read More »
With the firing of our new hybrid rocket engine only weeks away, the controlling electronics are starting to take shape!
So quite a while back some PCBs arrived courtesy of Cambridge Circuits for the first revision of Dora, a data logger for use in our custom static fire test rigs. The device itself consists primarily of an STM32 processor, a micro SD card, and analogue front ends for a thermocouple, strain gauge and pressure sensor. We …
Over the past week we have modified some of the existing parts of Quasar (our static hybrid rocket) and machined a new injector and nozzle in the student workshop.
Some of our team have recently been developing a prototype hybrid rocket motor. Our motor was to be ignited by lighting a length of slow-fuse, waiting for the fuse to burn down some of the length of the fuel, then opening a valve to allow the oxidiser to flow through the fuel. The oxidiser valve …
The CUSF team have been building a rig to test a rocket motor whilst it is firing. The rig is designed to mechanically separate the X-Y-Z components of thrust, using a series of spring steel flexures. The 3 axes of thrust are then measured by 5 separate load cells to get the axial thrust, off-axis …
