¶ Welcome to the Imperial College London Rocketry Wiki!
"ICLR shall be run with the purpose of providing experience in the field of Rocketry, in both a practical and theoretical manner. Emphasis will be placed on the physical application of complex rocketry concepts, exposing students to a variety of technical skills in hopes of preparing them for the space industry."
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¶ Teams
¶ Airframe, Integration and Recovery
“No more Banana Rocket” - Jakob
The Airframe, Integration and Recovery team is responsible for the rocket's safe descent back to the ground, the structure and bodywork of the rocket, and the integration of the recovery system, avionics, propulsion systems and payload. All of this must be achieved whilst maintaining structural integrity, precision alignment and aerodynamic form. This requires the design, simulation, manufacture and test of both metal and composite parts, all done by our talented students. Design is done using Fusion 360 and finite element simulations are mainly done using Abaqus. The team prides itself in carrying out manufacturing of composite parts in-house, such as the nosecone, fincan, structural body-tubes and panels. The team also hosts unique parachute reefing tests at the historic Lasham Airfield, and compressive tests of metal 3D printed parts at Imperial's DFF Laboratory.
This year includes some interesting projects: the completion of our composite filament winding machine for tanks and body tubes; developing our forged carbon fibre and prepregnated composites capabilities; implementing our retractable launch lug design; and a new evolution of our separation system.
Leads:
- Zak Leek (Team)
- Ahmad Shaeel Akhtar (Technical)
¶ Flight Dynamics
Rocket go up?
Leads:
- Ben Groat (Team)
- Dan Dyoniziak (Technical)
¶ Propulsion
We do TVC I promise
Hopper pump fed cryo lox propane spaceshot 🤓👆
Leads:
- Raghav Ramkumar (Team)
- Baboucarr Jeng (Technical)
- Rudra Nakade (Technical)
¶ Electronics
"Whats that smell?"
The electronics team is responsible for engineering the entire avionics stack. This ranges over a wide range of technologies, from our set of custom flight PCBs and firmwares to a backend stack that enables the operations team full telemetry readouts and control over the rocket sub-systems.
The frameworks and technologies we currently use include C++ running on FreeRTOS for our firmware, custom ESP32 boards using an arbitrated CAN bus for communication that handles everything from actuator control to reading pressure sensors and calculating the position of the rocket. Our backend applications are built in python to enable platform agnostic development; these apps enable USB access onto the CAN bus, as well as hosting a telemetry dashboard through Grafana that shows live data from the rocket.
Our main projects this year include:
- Conformal Antennae
- Buck-Boost Regulator
- Camera Controller
- Firmware
- Design and Scoping of a New Avionics Stack
- Thrust Vectoring Guidance, Navigation and Control
For a detailed list of our projects, check out Projects in the Electronics subdirectory.
In addition to this, we will be focussing on teaching and plan multiple technical lectures about understanding hardware and firmware development as well as rocketry as a whole. We are planning some industry talks from European space companies throughout the year which will be interesting!
If you are interested in working on our rocket electronics systems or want to get in contact, then please don't hesitate to send an email to the team lead, Riley at [email protected], or our technical lead, Will at [email protected] and Jack at [email protected].
Leads:
- Riley Horrix (Team)
- William Richards (Technical)
- Jack Crane (Technical)
¶ Payload
The Bidoof of rocketry
Leads:
- Jayden Jackson (Team)
¶ Officers
- Treasurer: Roshan Frost
- Social Media: Chloe Cheung
- Safety Officer: Hardik Modi