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Project Sisyphus team members Stefan Arroyo-Cottier (left) and Matthew Gordon machine the engine’s injector which controls propellant flow rates and mixing. Photo credit: Project Sisyphus team.\u00a0<\/p>\nA group of fourth-year students on the University of Waterloo\u2019s Rocketry team designed, built and tested a fully reusable rocket engine for their Capstone Design project. It’s one of the most complex student rocketry engines built in Canada.<\/p>\n
Called Project Sisyphus, the engine uses regenerative cooling \u2014 circulating fuel through built-in channels to prevent the chamber from melting \u2014 and additively manufactured parts 3D printed in copper.<\/p>\n
The Waterloo Rocketry team typically builds its engines with ablative liners. These thermal protection materials slowly erode as the engine burns to insulate the metal chamber and prevent structural failure. It\u2019s much cheaper than buying a single-use commercial engine that\u00a0costs around $3,000 \u2014 but an ablative engine also only works once. It needs to be remade after each use, which takes a full team and significant turnaround time.<\/p>\n
On top of that, Canada currently has no permanent rocket launch sites. If you want to test your rocket in flight, you have to travel to the U.S., which is costly and complex. The result is that Waterloo Rocketry gets no time in the air outside of Launch Canada, the country\u2019s largest student rocketry competition.<\/p>\n
“The only time we get to test our rocket in flight is when we launch it at the competition,\u201d says Joel Godard, a mechanical engineering student on the Project Sisyphus team. \u201cThis has been a thorn in our side for years \u2014 we can’t fully test our parachute and active control systems on the ground, we just have to trust they’ll work and that the rocket will break records.”<\/p>\n
Project Sisyphus gives Waterloo Rocketry an engine that makes it easier and more affordable for the team to test their rocket systems in-flight ahead of competitive launches.<\/p>\n
Regeneratively-cooled, reusable engines have existed since the Apollo era in the 1960s. But organizations like NASA, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance keep a tight lid on their design and development.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are publicly available documents, but they give you the general architecture, not the specifics,\u201d says Matthew Gordon, a mechanical engineering student and Project Sisyphus team member. \u201cThere\u2019s no off-the-shelf instruction guide so we designed and built our engine from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the project\u2019s defining challenges was the distribution manifold \u2014 the component responsible for spreading fuel evenly across the engine\u2019s 79 cooling channels. Uneven flow means uneven cooling, and uneven cooling means a melted engine. The team solved the problem in part by using the knowledge and skills they learned in their fourth-year computational fluid dynamics course.<\/p>\n
Project Sisyphus team members Stefan Arroyo-Cottier (left) and Matthew Gordon machine the engine’s injector which controls propellant flow rates and mixing. Photo credit: Project Sisyphus team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Being members of Waterloo Rocketry also gave them access to the Sedra Student Design Centre in the Faculty of Engineering \u2014 a facility so well-equipped it\u2019s the envy of students at other universities. Andrew Milne, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering and Faculty advisor, provided design guidance throughout the project. Les Ankucza and Ryan Cadeau, machine shop technicians and instructors, helped with machining, assembly and testing.<\/p>\n