Armadillo Aerospace News: Vehicle hot firing

After a great deal of work this week, we got the entire vehicle together and ran propellant through it.
We got new stainless spreading plates for the engines from http://www.globalstencil.com/ . They have been turning our orders around from CAD drawing to (local) delivery in under a week, which is really nice for our schedule. The new plates have 848 holes of 0.022” diameter, which is over four times as many holes, but with a smaller diameter. We tested the spreading by flowing propane / air through a chamber blocked by the spreading plate and seeing how many 20 mesh screens we needed to add to get a uniformly even flame without hot jets in the spreading plate hole pattern. I was a little surprised to see that it still took seven screens, down only three from our 204 hole spreading plates. Read More