SKODEN

Sitting at the frontier of our development for liquid rocketry, Skoden is a blow-down, self-pressurizing nitrous and ethanol liquid bipropellant rocket that has an envelope of 8 inches in diameter, and 3 meters in height.

A relatively lightweight vehicle that, with current designs, come out to 56kg, Skoden is a light but powerful vehicle, it is armed with a 5kN, 4.85MPa 4:1O/F engine specced for sea level operation, giving a projected thrust to weight ratio of 9.1. Given these key specifications, we address the development of this engine as 5KN4.85MPA4_1OF, and future engines developed by us will follow similar names as well. 

The 5KN4.85MPA4_1OF engine is lined with a carbon throat, and an ablative material in the combustion chamber and nozzle, all of which will be milled from a lathe. Heat simulations and hand calculations approximate the rate of heat flux to the ablative walls, which allow for adjustments in the design of the engine’s combustion chamber, throat, and nozzle to achieve the target burn time of 20 seconds. Above which, sits our triplet impinging injector plate, which has gone through extensive proof testing through cold flows, high fidelity fluid simulations, and dimensionless characterization of toleranced resin 3D printed parts has allowed us to optimize the impingement angle, diametric ratio between oxidizer and fuel streams, and the impingement distance for the highest reasonable mixing efficiency given manufacturing constraints and the heat flux delivered to the face plate. 

Our three primary design parameters that define the specifications and needs of our rocket: 

(a) The concentric tanks, holding the nitrous and ethanol

(b) A two-piece triplet impinging injector plate and manifold, with radial passages running the ethanol and the central manifold running the nitrous

(c) An ablative engine combustion chamber, and a graphite throat

Using NASA CEA, Thermodynamic Analysis, Incompressible Vicid Flow modelling, and high-fidelity FPM FEA methods, we characterize the features of our rocket to hit our target design needs.