Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5)

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Newly refurbished mobile static test stand. Our thanks to Orion Propulsion of Huntsville for their continuing support and the use of their test facility. Fellow HALO team members (Clay and Aaron) checking out the test stand before starting test preparation work. September 30, 2006.
Prepping the motors took several hours. Including hooking up various nitrous and CO2 lines, and running electrical cables to the trailer and setting up test equipments. Here you see Steve and Al preparing the motor for pressurization test.
After successful pressurization test, Steve is hooking up the igniters and put in flight nozzle. This is actually an flight motor. We used commerical grade aluminum tube case and flight nozzle.
Looking at the nozzle. The red and black wires are the 14 volts DC power used to ignite the electric matches. Cork is used to add additional thermal protection of the nozzle from the exhaust heat.
After half a day of prep work, we are ready for the firing. Even though the motor only has 350 lb of thrust, the test stand is securly tied down.
HALO "Chief Engineer" Steve sitting in Orion Propulsion converted semi-trailer, complete with TV monitors and computer monitoring equipment that is used to activate gas valves and collect data from the test stand.
View of the test facility from about 100 feet away. For safety reason, the motor is "behind" the Hyundai cargo container. The shinny red trailer is the control center. This picture show the motor flame abruptly stopped, and then coughed a small cloud of smoke. The test terminated about a second and a half.
Video still of the motor firing (right after ignition). The load cells indicated the motor is producing about 300 lbs of force right about now.
Oops! About a second into the firing, we had a case rupture. You can make it out in the center of the picture. Months of work (few hours a week) gone. But at least the motor is secured.
Just immediate after the case rupture, the nitrous are pouring out of the rupture and down the nozzle. The nitrous gas are actually extinguishing any fire that is still burning. We then terminate the N2O flow and purge the motor with CO2.
Case rupture near the injector bulkhead. The black 'ring' on the right is the carbon fiber that we wrapped around the injector bulkhead swage. The explosion pushed the fuel grain (black rubber) and case outward. The brownish fractured pieces are the charred white PVC pipe that we used to hold the HTPB rubber. The two light orange "patches" with tapes are the strain gauges.
Another view of the rupture area.

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