Ground testing of a liquid fueled rocket motor

Abstract

In a research project carried by TUBITAK-SAGE, Turkey's first operational liquid fuelled rocket motor has been designed, manufactured and tested. The rocket motor uses hydrogen peroxide as oxidizer and hydrocarbon based chemical as fuel. Also some metal salts are added into the fuel in order to attain hypergolic ignition. The fuel and oxidizer are fed into the system by using high pressure nitrogen gas. The control of pressurized fuel and oxidizer into the motor combustion chamber is achieved by using pressure operated valves and a control card. Mass flow rates of oxidizer and fuel are controlled by using cavitating venturis. In order to improve the combustion performance, an unlike triple impinging type injector is used to spray the fuel and injector into the combustion chamber. Before the testing of the liquid propellant rocket motor (LPRM) system, some simplified tests were performed on subsystems. These tests include flow rate check tests, hypergolic ignition tests and flow tinting tests. This paper contains the detailed explanation of the liquid propellant rocket motor system that has been ground tested, and the results of the tests performed. The ground tests were performed at the static test ramp, at TUBITAK-SAGE, Ankara. In the first motor test no data is taken and the general characteristic of the rocket motor is observed by using normal speed and high-speed cameras. In later tests two pressure transducers is mounted on the rocket liquid propellant rocket motor (LPRM) System. The first transducer is mounted to the rocket motor body to measure the combustion chamber pressure and the second one is mounted at the exit of the cavitating venturi. The rocket motor aluminum case is instrumented with three strain gages and two temperature sensors. A third temperature sensor is also placed at the nozzle exit to measure the nozzle exit gas temperature.