Summer Break 
Saturday, July 1, 2006, 08:46 PM
Due to the test facilities not being ready we decided to give the students the rest of the summer off. We'll be starting back up again in September right after school starts. We're very hopeful that the road to the test stand will be in place by then.
  |  permalink
Ignitor Testing 
Saturday, June 24, 2006, 08:31 PM
Rob spent time explaining the basics of the ignitor system to the team. The ignitor uses butane and nitric oxide as fuel and oxidizer respectively. We also utilize a high voltage transformer with a spark plug as the ignition source. These all meet in a small combustion chamber. The result is a strong flame, which is resistant to being blown out (a concern which the high pressure fuel/oxidizer of the main motor is flowing).



We spent a few hours configuring and hooking up the ignitor to the data acquisition system. Our goal was to capture and plot the fuel pressure and the temperature of the combustion chamber.
We wired up the two valves and the high voltage spark source. We were ready to go…



The igniter system was ~20 feet away from our data acquisition system so we ran lines out to it. Well we had a set of unfortunate failures. It seemed that we could not actuate the valves (which required 12-volts). We were able to switch on the high voltage transformer (needing 4-20v) but the valves just would not cooperate. We began debugging and it seemed we were not getting any volts out of our data acq board …. We didn’t realize it but our voltmeter had blown a fuse. The voltmeter was show 0 volts when looking at various test points on our LabVIEW data acq board. We had thought we had fried something. It was most frustrating.

So after an hour we decided to hook up the ignitor to the manual switches to show the parents. It was a good firing. Afterward (using another voltmeter) we realized we had too much of a voltage drop over the cabling out to the valves and that is why we could not control them. So we still have much work to do.

  |  permalink
Ignitor Test Preparation 
Saturday, June 17, 2006, 08:23 PM
In an effort to drive home the things we learned over the last 3 months the computer team decided to build the ignitor control software from scratch (using LabVIEW of course). We spent time building the control display and the pressure and temperature visualization display. Other team members rebuilt the data acquisition portion of the control system and defined the wiring layout. Other team members prepared the needed cabling to hook up the system end-to-end.

We ran test using the brass board and felt comfortable with the software in preparation for the ignitor test next week.

  |  permalink

Back Next