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Cool Fluid Dudes

Rocket Engine Injector Plate Testbed

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Membership level

2020-2021 Team

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Team Name

Cool Fluid Dudes

Project Title

Rocket Engine Injector Plate Testbed

Design Challenge

There is a need to create a safe, reliable, easy-to-use, and accurate testbed apparatus for evaluating the design and performance of injector plates used in hybrid rocket engines. The goal of this project is to create an injector plate testing fixture that is reliable, cost-effective, and flexible for evaluating various injector geometries. This testing fixture will be produced for Rice Eclipse’s Fluid-Flow sub-team within the Eclipse Propulsion team.

Design Summary

Our design uses a high-pressure chamber with a steel segment and an acrylic segment to replicate the engine's operating pressures. The injector flowfield is measured quantitatively by a Pitot probe that actuates across the chamber diameter and qualitatively by slow-motion video taken through the acrylic chamber segment, captured from a blast-shielded phone camera. The testbed features a fluid supply system that is capable of accepting a variety of test fluids in standard gas cylinders and is capable of safely pressurizing the fluid to the desired test pressure. The testbed is designed to be modular, with adaptable inserts for injectors of different sizes and a swappable nozzle throat plug that easily changes the chamber pressure downstream of the injector to simulate different engines.