Space Shuttle Main Engine

Chemical Rocket Propulsion

MECH 581A4

Hybrid Rocket Motor Design Project: One of the main components of this course is the semester design project in which each student team designs, builds and tests an 10 lbf thrust hybrid rocket motor.   The thrust chambers are fabricated from aluminum and the nozzles are fabricated from graphite.   Solid fuel grains consisting of HTPB and HTPB/Al are produced by each team.  The oxidizer is gaseous oxygen supplied at 500 SLPM.  The chamber pressure is constrained to 150 psig.  Each rocket is tested on a thrust stand that enables the measurement of instanteous oxygen mass flow rate, chamber pressure and thrust.    With these data, each team is able to measure thrust (F), specific impulse (Isp), characteristic exhaust velocity (C*), thrust coefficient (Cf) and compare these measurements to their theoretical models, which predicted instaneous O/F, C*, Pc, and thrust.

Instructor: Anthony J. Marchese                 

Instructions for the final design report can be downloaded here

Links to papers on previous bench scale hybrid rocket motors: paper1, paper2, paper3, paper4

Powerpoint presentation on "paper4" design project here.

Useful links for hybrid rocket motor suppies:  aerocon systems, loki research, apogee components, graphite store

IREC 2015 Team:  In parallel with the 2015 Rockets Class, we entered a team in the 2015 Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition.  The team (John Whitmore, Joe Pointer, Shawn Nicholson and Geoff Pietz) built an HTPB/paraffin/N2O hybrid rocket that generated 400 lb thrust and launched a payload of 10 lbm to an altitude of 4,000 feet.  Theirs was the only hybrid rocket to successfully launch and retrieve in the past 2 years of the competition and the team was awarded the Dr. Gil Moore Award for Innovation:

First test firing of 380 lb thrust IREC hybrid rocket motor
Test Fire 4
Test Fire4 from Hilltop

Test Fire 5

IREC Launch Video - 27 June 2015

home and objectives

course outline and notes

homework assignments

NASA CEA Code

rocket of the week

design project

rules and grading

Colorado State University  • Fort Collins, CO 80523 • Phone / 970.491.2328
Contact  marchese@colostate.edu with questions, problems or comments.
©2019 Anthony J. Marchese.