Regulations on testing liquid fueled rocket engines in maryland?!

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Ok, so, i`m working on a liquid rocket engine, I will be testing safely, so don`t worry..... But before I begin construction, i`m unsure about the regulations around here for doing this kinda stuff, I don`t want to be arrested when I test it (that would be bad), Is there a site where I can see the regulations? I looked pretty much everywhere, but nadda....

Thanks!

[YNM]

Do you want to fly them or not ?

If you want to launch them, consult NAR and FAA.

If you're only static-test them, I think it's not much different than operating a welder or something ? Also depends on what chemical you're using, if it's toxic then there should be some regulations.

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Naw, i`m not flying them *yet*

[Bill Phil]

Maybe open flame laws and regulations would apply?

[sevenperforce]

Not an attorney and this is not legal advice...

...but you should check your local ordinances. State law probably won't have any issues, as long as you aren't flying the engine or profiting off of the engine in some way, but your local (city, county, etc.) ordinances may have rules about fires and noise restrictions that you will need to stay aware of.

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Well, I do live in a mildly closely packed neighborhood (2 acres of land), So i`ll probably find a testing area so that I don`t.... Deafen people?

[TheEpicSquared]

On 9/21/2017 at 10:15 PM, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

Well, I do live in a mildly closely packed neighborhood (2 acres of land), So i`ll probably find a testing area so that I don`t.... Deafen people?

Good call.

[Vanamonde]

I think fire department and FAA would be the agencies to check with. If they're not, they could tell you who is. 

[lajoswinkler]

You're testing an engine at this point. Unless you're using poisonous compounds your engine would release in copious amounts in the environments, I don't see any problems (for example releasing hydrazine like it's steam). When you start with flight tests and expect breaches of certain flight ceiling, you have to inform a regulatory agency that deals with these things and I think that would be the FAA where you live.

Edited September 26, 2017 by lajoswinkler

[James Kerman]

Maryland appears to be quite auspicious when it comes to amateur rocket launches - http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a4168/4315103/.

OT:
National Association of Rocketry - laws and regulations.

You could also contact the Maryland-Delaware Rocketry Association (MDRA).

 

Edited September 26, 2017 by James Kerman
edited for more info

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Thanks guys!

[Ultimate Steve]

Thinking I *might* consider trying this for myself, do you think the rules would be any different in Iowa? Or if I'm using a small hydrogen peroxide monopropellant thruster instead of an oxygen+fuel combo?

 

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

You should be ok,  Just test in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty easy in iowa , but if you can, go for a bomb range, I don`t think having a bunch of super heated  shrapnel punch holes through your body would be very healthy......

[wumpus]

11 hours ago, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

You should be ok,  Just test in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty easy in iowa , but if you can, go for a bomb range, I don`t think having a bunch of super heated  shrapnel punch holes through your body would be very healthy......

I don't think they let just anyone blow things up at Aberdeen proving grounds.  I'd also be rather careful in asking questions about doing anything like that.

My guess is that your biggest concerns are having enough measurements so you can be far away for the duration of the burn, making sure that there is no way for the test to ignite a wildfire (not nearly the concern in Maryland as the West), and far enough away from anyone to avoid making noise (that freaks out neighbors).

[Green Baron]

In addition to @James Kerman link:

http://www.nar.org/high-power-rocketry-info/filing-for-faa-launch-authorization/filing-for-faa-waiver/

Copy and paste to search & find: 14 CFR 101.25 :-)

 

Edited October 2, 2017 by Green Baron

[Ultimate Steve]

19 hours ago, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

Just test in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty easy in iowa

The main problem with that is that I was going to use a Hydrogen Peroxide monopropellant thruster (for reasons) and even though HP isn't nearly as bad as (God forbid) hydrazine, I don't think any farmers would like having me spill it onto a field (where crops would grow and people would end up eating HP). Although I'll be using a hundred mL at best (unless I actually develop the proposed spacecraft, then it's about 3kg, but that will never happen). Most of "nowhere" in Iowa is taken up by fields. I'd need the farmer's permission (and who on Earth would let a 15 year old lunatic test fire a rocket engine on their property?).

[DerekL1963]

6 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

The main problem with that is that I was going to use a Hydrogen Peroxide monopropellant thruster (for reasons) and even though HP isn't nearly as bad as (God forbid) hydrazine, I don't think any farmers would like having me spill it onto a field (where crops would grow and people would end up eating HP).

0.o  If the HP touches anything organic, it's going to react and break down almost immediately.

[Ultimate Steve]

11 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

0.o  If the HP touches anything organic, it's going to react and break down almost immediately.

Okay, thanks. I guess I don't know as much as I thought I knew... wait...

You know, maybe I shouldn't be building this after all...

[DerekL1963]

Everyone has to start somewhere... 

[Ultimate Steve]

On ‎10‎/‎2‎/‎2017 at 7:29 PM, DerekL1963 said:

Everyone has to start somewhere... 

In an effort to increase my position on the graph, I decided to do some research into the propellant. I found out that people use HP in jetpacks and rocket cars and stuff. I also found out that many sites I visited made HP out to be a vastly more dangerous substance than I thought it was, especially in high concentrations (and in order to work as an effective monopropellant the concentration needs to be quite high). I thought to myself "woah, that's dangerous." and then found one site where this guy (totally credible source) talks about how when he made giant rocket cars he kept drums of the high concentration stuff in his garage (so it can't be that dangerous as long as you don't have any impurities, right?) but then I tried to look up where you can get highly concentrated HP... as it turns out, the smallest available shipment of 90% HP is one metric ton.

I was thinking more like <1kg for initial tests of a small motor... And the vehicle I'm designing the engine for will actually mass <5kg total, so I'd really never be able to use a metric ton (and I wouldn't want a literal ton of that anywhere near my house anyway).

So that's out. Presumably they don't make it easier because of the amount people who want that concentration of HP, 95% of them want to build a bomb and 5% are people like me who just want to build a rocket engine...

So, I can't buy any. If they sold it in small amounts, I'd be good, but if I bought a ton of the stuff, I'd have the government on my doorstep pretty quickly, I'd imagine. So then I looked at purification methods for the 30-35% HP they do sell. As it turns out, these are also pretty scary.

You can freeze the water and not the HP, but the freezing points are so similar that there's really no room for error. You can boil them, but H2O2 tends to explode right above that temperature, and I don't wish to get my face blown off.

There's also the issue that if HP comes into contact with basically anything other than aluminum, air, water, and a few other things, it decomposes exothermically and explodes. I mean, this would be workable if I could buy it at high concentration in a safe container, but if I have to purify it myself, the risk of exposure to impurities during purification is way too high.

So, yeah, if I end up actually doing this it's probably going to be an even smaller test motor which will make use of the 30% stuff, unless I can come up with a vastly safer solution than purifying H2O2 myself.

 

And this was the safest monopropellant I could find, believe it or not! If I'd chosen any other monopropellant *cough* *Hydrazine* *cough* I'd have stopped long before I got to this point.

[DerekL1963]

3 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

I thought to myself "woah, that's dangerous."

That's because HTP is dangerous.
 

3 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

then found one site where this guy (totally credible source) talks about how when he made giant rocket cars he kept drums of the high concentration stuff in his garage (so it can't be that dangerous as long as you don't have any impurities, right?)

Short term storage is fine, long term storage can be dicey as even when mixed with stabilizers it still spontaneously decomposes over time so the containers have to be properly vented.  (And the area it's stored in properly ventilated.)  Just because one guy was playing Russian Roulette and lived - that doesn't mean that playing Russian Roulette is a good idea.
 

3 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

And this was the safest monopropellant I could find, believe it or not!

If you're going to play with rocketry, you're quite literally playing with fire.  But you've now got a leg up, you know to research and think.

[wumpus]

12 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

And this was the safest monopropellant I could find, believe it or not! If I'd chosen any other monopropellant *cough* *Hydrazine* *cough* I'd have stopped long before I got to this point.

The whole concept of a monopropellant is incredibly dangerous.  The stuff simply *must* be able to break down more or less by itself and recombine energetically.  While H₂O₂ presumably needs a catalyst (and hopefully limit exploding on its own), it is hardly safe.  Mixing fuel and oxidizer might be wildly more complicated, but it is used for a good reason.

[Ultimate Steve]

On ‎10‎/‎4‎/‎2017 at 1:06 AM, DerekL1963 said:

If you're going to play with rocketry, you're quite literally playing with fire.  But you've now got a leg up, you know to research and think.

 

On ‎10‎/‎4‎/‎2017 at 9:49 AM, wumpus said:

The whole concept of a monopropellant is incredibly dangerous.  The stuff simply *must* be able to break down more or less by itself and recombine energetically.  While H₂O₂ presumably needs a catalyst (and hopefully limit exploding on its own), it is hardly safe.  Mixing fuel and oxidizer might be wildly more complicated, but it is used for a good reason.

Warning: This post is technically off topic relative to this thread but it's not really worth starting its own thread for (yet).

I've decided to switch to either a resistojet or an arcjet for the mission I planned (like a nuclear thermal rocket except using electricity rather than radioactive material to heat the fuel).

Long story:

Basically what I've been trying to design is a spacecraft that weighs 50kg or less in LEO that can impact the moon (50kg because it would be able to launch on CloudOne, a smallsat launcher that will hopefully be cheaper than anything else out there). The first stage is a solid fuel kick motor (44kg) which does about 3km/s of work, and the second stage is 6kg and provides the course corrections.

It will have cold gas thrusters as RCS and a standard control unit, etc...

However, the main propulsion system gave me trouble. I considered five ideas (in order):

1. Monopropellant. I settled on H2O2 because it was dense, almost safe (safer than hydrazine at least) and had decent efficiency (161s). Ultimately dropped because it was unsafe and you can't buy the pure stuff easily.
2. Cold gas main engine using compressed N2 - Low cost and easily attainable. The only problems are that even at 3000PSI the nitrogen is still 10x less dense than pretty much anything else. The container will also weigh 4-5x the mass of the propellant, and N2 has an isp of optimistically 75s, leading to a total spacecraft Delta-V of about 50m/s... not good. The H2O2 model had 600.
3. Any sort of bipropellant - the only suitable non-toxic one I could find was kerolox. This presents on orbit boiloff and freezing problems, as I need the stage to last three days. It's also hard to fit fuel, pumps, a pressurization system, a combustion chamber, and an ignition system in only 3kg...
4. Ion engines - probably hard to make yourself and expensive if you buy them. Also, I'd need special tanks as well as lots of solar panels.
5. Electric thermal (arcjet/resistojet) - low thrust and electricity demands that are pretty high, but the fuel can be basically anything (I'm leaning towards an Ammonia/Water mix) and efficiency ranges from decent (290s) to astronomical (many thousands of newton-seconds) leading to the need for less propellant, freeing up mass for the extra solar panels. Not still sure how much I need, but I'm pretty sure this is the option I'm going to go for. Also, waste heat might be a bit of a problem.

Thanks for your help in me realizing that H2O2 was somewhat of a bad idea.

Carry on with the thread!

 

Wait, did some research and resistojets have waaaay lower thrust than I expected... Current design has the TWR at around 0.005 or something like that... Back to the drawing board! Again!

[wumpus]

Bipropellant: pumps are almost certainly right out unless you have a massive budget.  It would almost have to be pressurized (pretty sure that peroxide needs similar).  I noted in the "amature orbital" thread that propane and nitrous oxide are not only readily available (probably about the *most* available fuels you can find), they are hypergolic (don't expect much sea level Isp, but it is higher than peroxide). link: https://tfaws.nasa.gov/TFAWS06/Proceedings/Aerothermal-Propulsion/Papers/TFAWS06-1026_Paper_Herdy.pdf

 

600m/s?  NASA has a competition to hit 500m/s (after gravity and aero losses): the only serious attempt to show up on this forum quoted a budget of $60,000 (don't forget that 500m/s was specifically chosen to avoid regulations: 600m/s (after losses) might involve paperwork NASA isn't interested in for multiple sub$100k projects).

Are you building a liquid engine or a rocket?  If you are building a liquid engine, I'd not care about mass and such (much of the reason that the mention budget gets so high) and simply build for a test jig.  Building a rocket seems to be putting the cart before the horse, and seems to be so many steps ahead that you can assume the final engine looks nothing like you are expecting now.