SPRINT Cold Flow Test - August 9th, 2025
Overview
This hot fire attempt at Jay's farm concluded with an igniter integration issue. We likely could have hot fired if we hadn't run into this problem. Before this, however, we did manage to cold flow with CO2 and distilled water.
August 8th was our first day integrating all systems, and it was a little ambitious to try to hot fire in the same weekend. That being said, most of our problems up until then were integration-related, and we solved all those issues over the weekend.
We didn't collect data for the cold flow, but characterizing mass flow rates actually wasn't the number one priority. Not to mention, getting good data for mass flow rate is tough because of the drop in pressures throughout the burn. We can choke the mass flow rate of N2O at the injector, but the fuel drops as N2O pressure on the piston decreases. The way we also can't measure mass flow rates during a cold flow of both CO2 and water independently because they're both in one tank. This is a trade-off of making the system flight weight.
Test Video
Team Photo
