Liquid propellant rockets engines, with their high impulse density, offer a path to the attainment of extreme altitudes at apogee for university class sounding rockets. The majority of student and amateur groups working with liquid propulsion use heavy pressure fed systems. By contrast, commercial class turbopumps, in addition to their significant engineering complexity, offer little in the way of mass ratio improvements for small launch vehicles. A mechanical engineering senior capstone team at Portland State University has developed a small, high head, low flow DC-motor driven centrifugal pump for rocket applications.
展开▼
