Experimental Design, Fabrication and Validation of a Small-Scale Liquid Bi-Propellant Rocket Engine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study presents the design, fabrication, and testing of a small-scale liquid bi-propellant rocket engine with a target thrust of 1000 N, using gaseous oxygen (GOx) as the oxidizer and a 70% ethanol-30% water mixture as the fuel. The engine’s components, including the thrust chamber, de Laval nozzle, and propellant feed system, were engineered with a focus on affordability and accessibility, utilizing locally sourced materials and in-house fabrication processes. The combustion chamber, constructed from SAE 316L stainless steel, was actively cooled using a soft-copper tubing-based conductive cooling system, ensuring safe operation under high thermal loads. Key design parameters were derived through extensive theoretical calculations and validated using MATLAB simulations. The injector system, featuring a conical spray pattern with 18 oxidizer ports, was calibrated to achieve an injection pressure of 25.34 bar, maintaining efficient propellant mixing. Testing included four hot-fire runs of three to five seconds each, with combustion chamber pressures reaching 15 bar, demonstrating subsonic combustion stability. Data acquisition was conducted using pressure transducers and load cells integrated into a custom graphic user interface for real-time monitoring. Despite challenges such as suboptimal atomization and material constraints, the engine operation was successful, validating the theoretical models. This research highlights the feasibility of developing cost-effective liquid rocket engines in resource-constrained environments, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. The results pave the way for future enhancements, including advanced injector designs and thrust vectoring systems, to optimize performance and broaden the engine’s application scope.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".