Borealis
The Borealis is a pressure-fed, bipropellant, semi-regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engine.
Borealis is an instrumentation engine, collecting laboratory-grade data for novel combustion research, design iteration, and future development.
Design Specifications
Specific Impluse
152 s
Total Thrust
1200 N
Chamber Temperature
2800 K
Chamber Pressure
4.83 MPa
The engine telemetry includes on-chamber thermocouples to collect three-dimensional combustion data, strain gauges to measure chamber expansion, and an in-chamber pressure transducer. Additionally, the fluid systems have a full suite of temperature and pressure sensors, and a load cell is used to measure thrust.
Borealis is fueled by ethanol and nitrous oxide, a combination we’ve been calling “EthaNOS” for short. Both propellants are pressurized by a common nitrogen system, and pump-fed water is initially used as a coolant.
A powerful data acquisition, control, and communication system ensures high quality data collection and safe operation of the engine and propellant system.
After our initial hot-fire, we’ll continue to use Borealis as a research and development engine while we work on flightweight successors. Major experiments are slated to test and collect extensive data on design variations for injectors, cooling systems, propellant ratio, and more.