Trailer Test Stand (2024)
As part of my role as Vice President of Avionics, and more recently President, I designed and built a large portion of our Test Stand Trailer. This trailer is designed to support "Sparrow", team's liquid rocket engine designed to produced 500lbf of force. Just like our engine, this test stand was completely custom for our applications, with a custom fluid delivery system and electrical system.
My primary role in this trailer was designing and building our control and data acquisition system. This system is divided into four parts: the power-supply/main-computer box, the power/network distribution box, controllers, and sensor readers. The power-distribution/main-computer box is an enclosure with a series of DIN rail mounted power supplies, safety relays, networking equipment, and our main Jetson Orin Nano Single Board Computer. Then the power/network distribution box takes ethernet and power from of power-distribution/main-computer box and converts them into M12 connectors. Then the controller and sensor readers are powered via a M12 cable per device coming from the power/network distribution box, along with a daisy-chained EtherCAT cable going between the devices.
In addition to the electrical/software components of this trailer, I also played a crucial role in the assembly of the structure and fluid system on the trailer. I assembled most of our nitrous fill line, IPA fill line, and nitrogen->nitrous purge line. Along with that, I also design and assembled our trailer crane, which is used for lifting k-bottles onto our trailer for transport.
