Project Neptune

Neptune is a collaboration with Seagate Space, in which AIAA and SEDS at UCF have partnered to develop a two-stage space shot rocket that will be launched off Seagate’s offshore launch platform.

I serve as the responsible engineer in charge of the booster stage. This includes the development of a custom composite propellant formula, motor hardware, and all justifications and defenses for engineering decisions made by my team.

We intend on going through several stages of SRM development including hydrostatic testing, strand burners, and subscale characterization motors.

In its current state, our propellant formula will be a high-solids loading, high-performance formula, utilizing a special binder system.

I have formulated several propellants and evaluated their potential for application in our booster, namely through metrics such as C*, Isp, and ideal chamber pressure. To make large range iteration possible, I modified my NASA CEA python code to allow for a scanning function that varies some object and plots its effect on C*, Isp, Chamber Pressure, specific heats of the combustion products and exhaust gas molecular weight. This also was modified to enable trade studies of propellant components such as trading aluminum weight % for ammonium perchlorate.

A large design requirement currently affecting us is ensuring a safe the formulation is safe, and easily manufacturable. This comes with an entirely separate research effort that is already underway and focuses on the rheology and thixotropy of different propellants.

Major Skills Utilized:

• Chemical Kinects analysis

• Propellant design

• Propellant evaluation

• Safety procedure compliance

• Propellant Kinect simulations

• Python