Events

The High Altitude Rocketry Team (HART) is a subsidiary group running under the AIAA Oregon State University Chapter. The purpose of HART is to build and fly a demonstration rocket capable of reaching Mach speeds, reach an altitude of above 30,000 feet, have in-flight dual deployment methods, and successfully and safely land. All of these feats must be designed and tested by students at OSU. Then once they have been acutely tested and proven, the rocket will be flown in Black Rock, New Mexico, competing on a global scale.

The Chemical Engineering Fuels sub-team is a division of the Propulsion sub-team. The Fuels sub-team collaborated heavily with the Propulsion sub-team to conduct mixes, static fire tests, and modeling of the fuel itself. The Fuels sub-team successfully secured a lab space with consistent temperature and humidity to better control the mixing process. The Propulsion and Fuels sub-teams worked together to standardize the mixing process by documenting operating procedures and incrementally improving those documents for readability and detail.

The Fuels sub-team sought to model the fuels in a more accurate way than the team currently had been. This would make it easier for future teams to be able to experiment with different mixtures and more reliably know whether or not a mixture would perform as expected. The team focused on modeling the mixing process itself using a chemical process software called ASPEN PLUS.

Another purpose of this team was to expand the knowledge base of the components and the properties. The Fuels sub-team conducted extensive literature review to be able to understand and eventually mathematically model both the mixing and combustion of the fuel. For a general overview for the reader; aluminum metal powder is the fuel, ammonium perchlorate is the oxidizer, hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene is the polymer binder, and modified di-isocyanate as a curative.