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Armadillo Aerospace News: 2500 lbf, Pressure ratios
We cut apart the most recent welded ring catalyst engine and added a third layer of 200 grams of rings and replaced the 2.2” nozzle with a 1.7” nozzle, giving the same 3:1 catalyst to throat ratio as the big motor. The big motor should be about 5.5x the thrust of the small motor, going from a 1.7” throat to a 4” throat.
The motor configuration is: 204 x 0.040” hole spreading plate, ten 20 mesh screens, 2 x 1” thick 600 cpsi monoliths, 3/16” support bar, 1/8” perforated flameholder, glow plug volume, 1/8” perforated plate as a top ring holder, 3 x 200 grams of rings supported by ¼” thick perforated plate with a 10 mesh 316 screen to keep the rings from pressing into the holes.
We made a very long burn to see if maximum heating would cause the rings to collapse. It ran 65 seconds at 400 lbf thrust with no problems at all, although parts of the chamber were glowing yellow hot. We did two more runs for calibration at different pressures:
775 lbf at 425 psi tank, 300 psi mid, 248 psi chamber
410 lbf at 232 psi tank, 184 psi mid, 149 psi chamber
There is no sign of warping on the thicker perforated plates. Read More

posted by Sigurd @ 1/11/2004 01:14:00 AM