BEtter, safer, and more reliable.
After the unsuccessful hot fire of the USC Liquid Propulsion Laboratory’s (LPL) Balerion 1 engine, work began immediately on the dev 2 engine. As one of 5 undergraduate in LPL, I was chosen for my ability to learn quickly and willingness to take leadership roles on projects regardless of being youngest guy in the room. Now one of the most senior members in the lab, I have been tasked with ensuring that the new engine will achieve our goals of successfully hot firing becoming the most powerful student built rocket engine ever.
As one of the lead engine development engineers, I worked with the team totally redesign the flange manifold that connects the chamber section of the engine to the nozzle, where the engine originally failed. Through thorough investigations of the original anomalously, we designed a cost effective and elegant set of solutions that could be implemented on the dev 2 engine.
We designed alignment features built directly into the 3-D print of the engine to prevent any rotational movement of the flange joint. We also redesigned the bolt system so that the bolts were directly threaded into the excess material from printing rather than with a nut on the other end that may rotate during vibration.
I personally conducted the FEA analysis on the regenerative cooling channels to estimate deformations and stress concentrations in the flange. I also evaluated the pressure losses in the fluid regen channels over varying amounts of predicted misalignment in the flange based on printing tolerances and machining tolerances for the alignment features.
