Today our propulsion systems class was invited to our professor's facility where he constructs small thrusters and rockets for small satellites. The satellites are as small as 4 inches by 4 inches. The first two pictures are from a test stand for a small 50 milliNewton thruster. It uses nitrogen gas, hydrogen peroxide, and a catalyst.
Sorry about the crummy pictures. My cell phone really doesn't take great photos. Click on a photo to enlarge. I tried to highlight the area of the thruster. Again, sorry about the poor quality.
The last picture is of a larger thruster that works off of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as the oxidizer and regular rubbing alcohol as the fuel. When you turn off the lights you can see the flame better. I think the thrust on this setup produced 22 Newtons?
One of my classmates was able to shoot some video of this thruster firing in the dark. The picture on the left shows the mach diamonds formed in the exhaust. The video below shows the entire firing.
Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail Reply On Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment