UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Here is a shot of a recent hotfire test of the AR2-3 rocket engine. It runs on hydrogen peroxide and kerosene. Developed in the late 1950's and tested on the F-104 jet (like the one Chuck Yeager crashed), this is the first time this rocket has been fired in 35 years.

You can also download a quicktime movie of this rocket test here.
Click here with your second mouse button and select 'save link as....'

I will be adding my technical publications and more pictures of rockets I have developed and tested. Right now, I only have these pictures of my Liquid Oxygen (LOx) and Tri-ethyl-aluminum (TEA) rocket! This is the first rocket I tested that was all my own design.

Here you can see the LOx manifold with the off-center hole which is the oxygen inlet and the TEA injector with the copper ring around the flange. It looks kind of frosty in the center. Actually that IS frost. The assembly is still cold from the last test, because we purge with LOx after shutting off the TEA. I made the TEA injector as a face shut-off check valve with a conical pintle. The TEA cone intersects a cone of LOx. Eleven LOx injection holes impinge on a conical splashplate--you can just see those eleven holes around the TEA injector. You can see "shadows" of those holes in the LOx manifold, little spots where there is less frost. That's where some TEA vapors must have put a little residue on the metal surface. Here is the assembly in the test rig, ready for hot fire.

In the future, look for "Testing of Gelled Nitrogen Tetroxide and Hydrazine in a 35 Lbf Miniature Rocket Engine" in which our hero (me) devises analogues to these dangerous propellants out of water and freon for safe bench testing, does some bitchen math and develops analytical methods of predicting flow with the gelled propellants themselves!

My favorite rocket propulsion links

Rocket Research Society
The X-Prize
NASA Watch
NASA's WWW servers
Rotary Rocket
Space Transportation Programs

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