The propulsion team is the team tasked with fabricating the rocket engine and propulsion sytem. Our goal is to make a liquid propellant engine, which is quite a task but we definitely are up to the task

We are a team of 6 members, with the numbers growing quite as much considering the team was formed close to a month and a half ago.

Team structure

The team leader for the Propulsion team is Washington Kamadi, from JKUAT taking BSc. Mechatronic Engineering. The team is composed of a mix of both JKUAT and PAUSTI students; Sammy, Ernest, Felix, Jeff, Brian and Fred

Our set goal is to take a rocket to the orbit, with which we plan to use a liquid fuel propellant. However, making a liquid fuel propellant is not quite an easy task and could take approximately five or more years, actually some Universities elsewhere have taken more.

So we decided to have a parallel path, one where we will build our liquid propeant rrocket engiine while we work on the simpler Solid motor. To get the solid motor to Kenya meant impotring it from abroad, with the nearest available option being South Africa, who we never got to get their contact information and that is where the interesting part came in, we decided to build one for ourselves.

Making a solid motor engine wasn't quite a tough task, as I had initially thought it wouuld have been. Using readily available equipment, preciisely; Powdered Sugar, Bentonite (Cat litter) and locally avaiilable Stump remover (Potassium NItrate) we made a pretty good solid rocket motor.

I was honestly shocked by the performannce of the one inch motor we made, and I was also quite happy at the levels of safety we managed to maintain despite the hazardous task we were performing. We achieved a 76 percent burn rate of the fuel we packed into our miniature rocket motor, which is quite good for a start.

After the test, which was basically a test for ignition and proof of concept, we decided our next stop would be to fabricate the static test stad to measue the thrust and to make a larger version of the first motor, with modifications to the first one.

The next task with us is making the Static thrust test stand for our solid motors, we want to measure the thrust we can generate from the tiny little things we made and see how much altitude we can achieve using the motors.

We plan to do this using an arduino and a load cell, to calculate, tabulate and plot curves on the behaviour of the thrust of our solid motor. The static test stand is currently under design by the different members of the group, which should be done in a weekend.

Fabrication of the static test stand is to begin immediately since we would like to set a target for our altitude come September when we are launching our first test into space. It would be impossible to set a target for the altitude we need without knowing the thrusts of the solid motors and how many we would need to get our rocket up and running.

Our Milestones

We are currently focusing on the solid motor rocket engine which is what we will use for the launch in September, also we are working on designing the liquid propellant engine that is quite of a task.. Keep following, we are working our minds around that.