SPARCC

SPARCC - Solid Propellant Adaptive and Responsive Combustion Control

Florida Institute of Technology

January 2023 - May 2024

• Senior design capstone project for the Northrop Grumman Engineering & Science Student Design Showcase at Florida Tech, researching attitude control methods for satellites.

• The propulsion system utilizes a "throttleable" solid propellent which is a simple, energy-dense solution compared to gas, liquid, or electric-based systems 

• The solid propellent was mixed and tested in a chemistry lab on campus and composed of Ammonium Perchlorate, HTPB, a plasticizer, and a curative.

• A MATLAB script was developed to help determine the amount (by mass) of each chemical in the propellent was required based on the shape and size of the propellent grain and the desired OF ratio.

• A thermal camera was also used to estimate combustion temperatures and a MATLAB script was used to filter the data, finding the hotspot temp in each frame from the thermal video.

• A glow plug (normally used in diesel engines) was used to ignite the propellent since they are reliable and quickly reach the temperature needed for ignition as well as being ceramic to protect it from the HCL released as a byproduct from combustion.

• In order for the propellent grain to make contact with the glow plug, a linear actuator pushed the propellent from the pellet storage to the combustion chamber.

• The combustion and pressure chambers are made from 1040 steel.

• A solenoid valve was connected to the end of the pressure chamber to release pressure as needed.

• A system was developed using an Arduino Uno R3 running on C++ code through Arduino IDE to control components such as the linear actuator, glow plug, and solenoid valve, as well as reading and recording data from onboard sensors.

• The control system utilized "bang-bang" control to rapidly open and close the valve to release a certain amount of pressure to generate a desired thrust.

• During the course of this project, major documents such as SRR, PDR, and CDR were created to help track the progress of the system design from beginning to end.