ERPS: Engines

The Bay Area's Non-profit Liquid Fuel Rocket Engine Design and Test Team

Engine Projects

The ERPS has several engine projects in the works at the current time. These represent an evolving design philosophy that builds experience and expertise incrementally with lots of testing and tinkering along the way. The old "build a little, test a little" philosphy used so well by people like Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunkworks is the underlying foundation of the program.

Bazooka Engine: The Bazooka is a mono-propellent test engine that started life as a rocket motor for a classic Bazooka Anti-tank weapon. It turned out that one we picked up at a surplus sale had almost exactly the right throat diameter and could be cut down to give the proper expansion nozzle size. This engine was used in the early "silver screens" tests of existing catalyst technology but was replaced by newer engines custom build by ERPS as the test program proceeded.

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50 lb Mono-propellent Engine: The M50 is a mono-propellent test engine with supports a load cell for measuring thrust. Several of these engine were used in developing and testing performance of the catalyst and the peroxide production techniques.

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M50-2 Instrumented Engine: The M50-2 is a sturdier variant of the M50 engine with multiple taps to provide ports for thermal sensors as well as a support point for the load cell. This engine is also of ERPS design and manufacture.

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M250 Spun Engine: The M250 is a stainless steel spun engine designed to provide 250 lbs thrust when configured with a mono-propellant feed head. This engine will be used in testing rapid cycling of the firing valves and throtle down capability and cycle rates for use in the Protina class vehicle as landing thrust.

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B500 Spun Engine: The B500 is a stainless steel spun engine designed to provide 500 lbs thrust when configured for bi-propellant feed. It is the test engine for bi-propellant operations and will likely power the Protina class small, reusable test vehicle during ascent phases of flight.

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M750 Spun Engine: The M750 is a stainless steel spun engine designed to test scalability of engine performance and to be used in early flight test vehicles. a number of these were manufactured at the same time to ERPS specifications and then madifications were made to test specific aspects of performance, catalyst pack size, thermal and restart ccycling, and duration burn test.

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B1200 Bi-propellent Engine: The B1200 is the first bi-propellent design, make by modifying one of the M750 engines to use a wrapped catalyst pack and a kerosene spray head for injection of the fuel. It is used to do initial bi-propellent testing and spray head optimization plus mix ratio tests, performance tests and throttling test.

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B5000 Bi-propellent Engine: The B5000 is the main bi-propellent design goal. By scaling up the B1200 design to a full sized flight weight engine we plan to do extensive performance optimization testing before licensing the engine for commercial production and sale.