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ANSARI X PRIZE Space Race News!

 
Armadillo Aerospace News: Big thrust gains
Our big order of modular 5.5” chambers arrived from DynaTurn. We now have lots of sections that we can bolt together with copper flange gaskets to produce any length 5.5” ID chamber, and swap the sections out to test different things. I milled an aluminum top plate with an O-ring seal for closing the test engines off, since that part of the engine won’t get hot enough to cook the O-ring.We closed up the bolt holes on some of the 2” thick sections and welded this to a 7” ID rolled tube to produce a “stepped” engine. We would have preferred to make a uniformly 7” ID chamber, but the foil monoliths are long lead time items, so we are making do with what we have on hand. The hot section has two layers with 500 grams of rings each. We also used an 0.040” hole spreading plate, reduced the cold pack to a single 1” thick 900 cpsi monolith, and added a little more top plenum space above the spreading plate to allow the flow to spread out easier, so it should be a superior engine in many ways to the previous ones. Read More

posted by Sigurd @ 1/18/2004 01:05:00 AM