Project Aeris (2017)

Aeris 10K COTS

The year 2017 represents McGill's 3rd participation in the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition. Aeris is our team's 10,000 ft category COTS solid motor rocket, which boasts a reliable, simple, but effective design. The design incorporates a student built carbon fiber airframe, refined separation and recovery mechanism, and a scientific payload studying the internal temperature and velocity data obtained from a pitot tube.

The vehicles architecture has 4 major components: propulsion subsystems, aerostructures subsystems , recovery subsystems, and payload subsystems. The propulsion system is an M-class COTS Aerotech motor which will produce7659 Ns total impulse needed to reach the target apogee of 10,000 feet.

The aerostructures subsystems are manufactured in-house through a newly developed resin infusion process. This was used to manufacture the nose cone, body tubes, fins, and boat-tail which make up the airframe of the vehicle. This process resulted in a significantly higher strength-weight ratio and significantly reduced lead time in production.

The recovery subsystems feature a dual pyrotechnic deployment out of a single seperation point in the airframe. The two parachutes emerge separately from each side of the separation point.

A student developed electronic-based avionics suite is used as the primary ignitation method. In addition, two stratologgers are used as redundant detonation systems.

Finally, the payload subsytems incorporates a nose-cone tip mounted pitot tube and a custom SRAD circuit board and electronics suite to gather inflight data for the computation of in flight velocity.

Results

Spaceport America Cup 2017

10K Category: 30th/45

Overall: 50th/82