January 23, 2008 notes:

 

Film cooled engine

 

The big lesson from the X-Prize Cup last year was that our engine start sequence wasn’t reliable enough. One of the issues we were fighting with was that our cooling jacket held quite a bit of volume, so starting the engines at idle required a 1.6 second igniter operation time, and we ran into issues melting the igniter. We detuned the igniter to the point that it didn’t melt, but then we had some problems with reliable ignition. We believe there were also separate problems with pushing hot gox back into the filling cooling jacket, and also possibly an assembly problem on one of the engines.

 

We had plans of attack to resolve these issues with the regen cooled graphite chamber engine designs, involving reducing the jacket volume and adding purges during startup, but we decided to try another approach that might resolve it more definitively.

 

Making a chamber out of stainless steel and just adding extra film cooling has some significant benefits, although it is going to suffer some penalty in Isp. We had some data points from the radiatively cooled carbon reinforced graphite chambers that we were using in 2006. We had one engine that glowed orange hot before failing, but the engines that we flew at the 2006 XPC weren’t even glowing red hot on the outside after 90 second flights.

 

We recently had a chamber fabricated by spinning seamless pipe down onto a two part tool. The first article did not come out perfect, with the throat not getting down to the desired radius and being somewhat non-concentric, but it was good enough to start our testing with, and we expect future ones to be better.

 

I debated for a long time whether to make the injector out of aluminum and either bolt to a flange on the chamber or slide it in and retain with a snap ring. I finally decided to just make the entire thing out of stainless, and weld it directly to the chamber. At least some of our problems can be traced to o-rings, so completely removing them has some benefits. It also opens up the possibility of welding the main propellant valves and igniter solenoids directly to the engine, removing any possibility of loosening fittings and leaks. We have checklist procedures to check various things for tightness pre-flight, but it is better to make it just not possible. Considering that a fitting leak brought down the first Falcon I launch, it is a real concern worth taking what steps we can to avoid.

 

I hate machining stainless, and I did break a few tools and trash a couple parts as we worked up the first prototype engine. The trick is to just be really patient. I finally got down to one quarter the spindle speed and one eighth the feed rate that I use on aluminum, and changed the drill bits before each part, rather than trying to get multiple parts out of them.

 

The stainless chamber is narrower in diameter than the aluminum cooling jacket, so our injector design couldn’t be used as-is. We are trying to go back to a single ring of injector elements with the igniter on the side of the engine, which gives us some fabrication advantages, but in the past we only got our injector face cooling completely resolved when we moved to a fuel – ox – fuel manifold arrangement, so this may not work out.

 

When we finished the prototype engine, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the assembly was 19 pounds lighter than the old engine, and when we go to welding the valves directly to the injector, we will save a couple more pounds.

 

On the first flight test we had a perfectly smooth startup, but we saw some burning metal coming out of the nozzle, so I aborted the flight early for inspection. Shutdown was fast and clean. The cylindrical part of the chamber wasn’t very hot at all, with no discoloration. There was discoloration on the nozzle, but it wasn’t uniform. The imperfect concentricity and contour on the first-article spun chamber probably caused the unevenness. Still, the chamber was in great shape. The injector had eroded under the lox manifold fairly deeply, but we decided to go ahead and run it some more to get more startup / shutdown data.

 

On the second flight, I skipped the normal lox pre-chill that we do, and it still started up smoothly. Somewhat surprisingly, there wasn’t any more metal burning on the second run, and I flew the vehicle for over a minute before setting it down. Shutdown was again very clean. It appears that the injector may have reached a thermal steady state thickness after burning some of the deck away.

 

We were going to do some more runs, but we were getting low on our fire suppression water after putting out some grass fires from the first two runs. Since we weren’t sure that the brand new engine design wasn’t going to blow up, I had been flying it at a lower altitude than normal, which results in a lot more flying hot rocks that can reach both sides of the runway from our test spot.

 

We are going out again next Saturday to horizontally fire the engine at full throttle to lean on it a bit more than the hover testing does. The following week we will have a second article chamber, and a modified injector with a smaller lox-wetted area and a thinner deck. Hopefully, that can become our new standard engine, and we can run off a big batch of them.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/postFlight.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/bareEngine.jpg

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/filmCooledFlight.mpg

 

 

Vehicle Plans

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/dualModule.jpg

 

We probably won’t wind up flying the two-module, differentially throttled configuration. I wanted to fly it as part of our phase I SBIR for the Air Force Research Laboratory, to demonstrate the fundamental nature of the modular rocket concept – take two separate flyable rockets, bolt them together, and you have a bigger rocket, but time has run out and apparently the phase II decisions have apparently already been made, but not announced yet. We should find out in a couple weeks if we are getting it or not.

 

We have four module tank sets mostly complete now, so we will probably be flying the fixed engine, differentially throttled configuration next. There has been some debate in the community about exactly how fast the valve actuators need to be for differential throttling a vehicle, with both Masten and Unreasonable Rocket believing that faster actuators are needed. Paul Breed went so far as to bet me $100 that we won’t be able to make a stable flight of our four module vehicle with our KZCO actuated valves.

 

I had recently updates our flight computer too log all the data at the full 200hz internal tick rate for several seconds after startup to give us higher fidelity data than what we normally get over telemetry to help develop engine start sequences. We were able to get a good look at the responsiveness of the engine to valve commands as the vehicle went from idle to liftoff thrust. Each vertical bar in the graph is 100 msec.  The vertical cursor is on the frame where the computer first sets the bit to start driving the valves open.  The valve pot feedback has moved on the very next frame, 5 msec later.  The chamber pressure has moved 50 msec later, and is substantially changed 100 msec from first command.

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/valveResponse.bmp

These are 0.5s KZCO medium torque valve actuator being driven at 16.0V by Russ's custom motor drive board. I think this is going to work just fine, and Paul is going to lose the bet. J

 

Once we have flown the four module system and convinced ourselves that it either works or doesn’t work, we will break the modules apart and start flying them higher and faster in Oklahoma. While we don’t have the permit in hand yet, it looks like AST has agreed in principle to let us fly our vehicles to 4000’ with our current safety systems. By light loading the vehicles and accelerating harder, we should be able to hit the same max-Q that our proposed suborbital vehicles will see, since we intentionally fly rather slow due to the wide, draggy nature of our modular vehicles. I expect we will wreck one or more of the modules in flight testing, but we have four of them, so it won’t be that big of a deal.

 

Once Spaceport America gets their final permit, we will take any remaining modules out there and see how high we can go. With the legs on, the modules don’t have a chance of getting to 100km, but if we learn all we need with normal flights, we might make a potentially-sacrificial flight of a module lifting off from a stand without legs. The landing wouldn’t be very pretty, but it might not be any worse than the return leg of our XPC flight last year.

Assuming the differential throttling works out on the four module system, our commercial vehicle plan is a six module triangular configuration with engines on the side between the tanks, using the base of the bottom spheres as landing pads. This configuration gives us full module-out redundancy, easy vehicle CG determination before launch, no landing gear weight, and it travels in flight orientation without a wide-load permit (just barely). For a cabin, we are going to use a 5’ diameter transparent sphere. I’ll see if I can get Matt to make a rendering of the vehicle for the next update.

 

 

A couple pics of the integrally machined fittings discussed last month:

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/integralFitting.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2008_01_19/cutawayFitting.jpg