GAR-E Cold Flow Test - August 19th–20th, 2023

The campaign flowed inert substitutes through the integrated Spender and GAR-E injector: two oxidizer-side carbon-dioxide tests and one fuel-side water test. The instrumentation installed for the weekend included seven pressure transducers and two thermocouples; two pressure channels were temporarily housed in the Spender enclosure rather than the planned pad-side LabJack.

Sequence and result

The water flow and both carbon-dioxide flows completed. The archived logs were mapped to a first carbon-dioxide run at 16:33, a second at 18:02 and the water run at 19:10. Operators had to work around GUI and sequence-control failures during the campaign.

Measurements and data limits

The water-side injector pressure drop was estimated at approximately 150 psi, but its regulator set pressure was above the recorded inlet pressure, which limits that calculation. The carbon-dioxide data showed an impossible apparent injector drop near 600 psi. The pressure traces froze or stopped before the representative main-valve transient, and the expected downstream shutdown drop was missing. The problem affected the saved data, not only the GUI display, so no reliable full transient or mass-flow result was recovered.

Corrective actions

The review called for independent verification of every pressure-channel mapping, continuous acquisition that could not be blocked by the command sequence, and a recorded high-rate check through valve opening and shutdown before another hot-fire attempt.

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