Solid Propellant Adaptive and Responsive Combustion Control (SPARCC) - Senior Capstone

Title, Date, Location:

Lead System Engineer

Aug. 2023 - May 2024

Melbourne, FL

Background:

The Solid Propellant Adaptive and Responsive Combustion Control (SPARCC) System was a proof of concept spacecraft propulsion device designed to eliminate one of the major drawbacks of using solid propellant: the inability to throttle, or control the amount of thrust desired in real time. At a higher level, the system would operate through the storage of small solid propellant grains. Whenever thrust was desired, a single grain would be moved to the chamber and ignited to pressurize a tank. The built-up pressure could then be released from the tank in a controlled manner to achieve the desired thrust.

Throughout the entire year long devleopment, different mechanism designs, material choices, propellant composition and mixing, control systems, electrical components, and much more were all considered and eventually constructed for a final showcase. The final assembly of SPARCC, as well as results from our testing, can be seen at the bottom of this page.

My Responsibilities:

As the Lead Systems Engineer for the project, it was my job to have a technical understanding of all subsystems to set and maintain requirements, and to use this knowledge to support the overall project. How this looked day to day was maintaining consistent contact and information transfer with all subsystem leads, delegating tasks based on upcoming deadlines, and filling in workload gaps as they would appear.

I would say the key responsibility for my role was not only a strong foundational technical knowledge, but also maintaining and ensuring effective and healthy communication between all team members about critical design decisions, and their reasons for them. In an engineering team of many, it can quickly become a daunting task to manage the delegation of tasks to those best suited for them, ensure their work is getting done on time, and ensure their decisions are made with requirements in mind. I believe the opportunity I was given during the runtime of this project was invaluable, and gave me a great deal of technical, manufacturing, testing, and leadership experience.

Results:

Below are some of the results from our testing! Also, some pictures to better illustrate the overall system design, and a showcase of the propellant (which was done in-house).