The complexity and cost of building a liquid fuel rocket engine typically makes such devices unobtainable for a majority of parties interested in their construction. Until recently, manufacturing processes and techniques limited the geometries available to the designer and rendered such engines cost prohibitive as options for inexpensive orbital space flight. Advances in additive manufacturing technologies provide the potential to prototype complex geometries on a lower budget and with lead times which would be considered unobtainable with traditional manufacturing methods. Furthermore, bipropellant liquid fuels offer many complex engineering considerations; the full analysis of which may not be within the design ability of many amateur builds. It is therefore advantageous to develop techniques for additive manufacturing rapid prototyping to make the study of bipropellant fuels more accessible. A mechanical engineering senior capstone team at Portland State University developed an open-source method for quickly prototyping small bipropellant liquid fuel rocket engines with regenerative and film cooling using additive manufacturing.
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