I figured now would be a good time to share something neat I worked on in
college.
For my capstone project our team built a permanent liquid rocket engine
testing facility, as well as a 1,000 lbf liquid rocket engine.
My job was designing/building the feed system. I built the feed system
using Swagelok, and to set the mass flow rates of our pressure fed engine,
I decided to use cavitating venturis.
I designed the venturi to be a slide in replacement for the front ferrule,
as shown in the cross section below.
(Straight barrel section fits in I.D of tube)
[image: image.png]
I believe this might be the only slide-in Swagelok compatible cavitating
venturi?
I got them machined out of stainless steel, photo of the finished product
below.
[image: image.png]
Before doing this, I made a little -6 AN cavitating venturi that ran on
water and shop air as a proof of concept. It worked great.
[image: image.png]
With the demo venturi I made the plot below. Apologies for the pixely
photo, digging through old college media:
[image: image.png]
And finally, I made an acrylic venturi where you could throttle downstream
pressure and see the results. I attempted to turn it into a GIF to share,
so hopefully this comes through alright.
https://giphy.com/gifs/dY0Cq7jWzo96ZEwT3O
<https://giphy.com/gifs/dY0Cq7jWzo96ZEwT3O>
Hope some folks found this interesting.
Daniel