Test Stand Rollout

Over the last year, UB SEDS has been mixing our own solid rocket propellant and built a test stand in house. This five part series will cover different tests while we were rolling out the test stand. The test in this post was our first burn, but since then we have run several more each one testing out a new part of the test stand.

Part 1 – Smoke Test

Part 2 – Backboard Test

Part 3 – Test Stand Structural Test

Part 4 – Test Stand Electronics Test

Part 5 – Test Stand Final Check Out

If you just want to skip to the end and see the test stand page, you can find that here.

If you want to find out more about mixing our propellant, you can find that here.

Smoke Test

In hardware testing, the first test of a new component is just powering it on. If it powers on without catching fire it is considered a success. Hence the colloquial name for these tests as smoke tests. With rocket motor testing it’s a bit different; durring the first burn of a rocket motor we of want the motor to ignite. It would be considered a success if the mixture ignited and burned without an over pressure event.

In case of an over pressure event, we buried the rocket motor in the ground so that only the nozzle was above the ground. This would contain any pieces of the casing if a catastrophic failure occurred. A battery 200 feet away was used to remotely ignite the motor.

The smoke test went well. The motor was ignited without an over pressure event, and I got this cool photo.

Note: We ran this test 2017-03-03 (YYYY-MM-dd as all dates should be formatted).

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