Beach Launch Team is the liquid rocket club at California State Univeristy-Long Beach. The club is presently developing a 8 inch diameter kerolox rocket, designed to reach an altitude of 100,000 ft. No student club has yet to reach this altitude with a student rocket, and the competition is fierce. In our attempt to win we are developing a new rocket from the ground up with updated methods.
As the structures team lead, I am developing a new structural strategy for the rocket. In the past Beach Launch Team's rockets have been purely supported by structural composite skins, however fabrication was never precise enough to fully take advantage of composite's material advantages.
Under my direction we are now planning to incorporate an aluminum air-frame, offering a variety of advantages, such as simplifying the integration of the propulsion systems, and the securing of the stabilizing fins. Below is our current planned internal structure for the rocket.
At present the plan is to plasma cut the air-frame members from aluminum sheets, as this will allow us to easily create any contour needed for aerodynamics, as well as easily cut unneeded material from the members, while keeping them very strong. These images are from the initial concept mock-ups.
Composite skins still play a vital role in the new design, as a thin carbon fiber skin will cover the air-frame, and a thicker structural skin will support the recovery system and nosecone. In the past the club has had issues with seams between composite body sections, I plan to avoid this by utilizing carbon fiber sleeves rather than rolls, which will allow us to make body tubes from a single piece of composite. I am also planning to improve fabrication by utilizing vacuum infusion and autoclave curing.
The current goal for the structures team is to develop our modeling and simulations, namely FEA using Ansys Mechanical, in order to fully characterize and optimize our final rocket structure.
I am also involved in the engine design where we are developing code in MATLAB to characterize our planned regeneratively-cooled engine.
The image is from our preliminary design, drafted by one of my teammates. The engine is designed for 1,000 lbf of thrust, regeneratively cooled by RP-1 and running on RP-1 and liquid oxygen. I was part of the team doing the initial trade study on fuel types, as well as deciding on impinging jet as the injector type. Since then I have been mainly involved in the development of the MATLAB code that is to be used to validate the design and make sure enough cooling is taking place.
I have also be involved with the avionics team, though currently the avionics are limited to data acquisition only.
