From homemade liners to a measurable thermal protection system

Mechanical Engineer · Ablatives · 6-inch hybrid · columbiaspace.org ↗

CSI’s propulsion program needed more than intuition under fire. We built an ablative-engineering pipeline (materials, molds, instrumentation) so the team could measure what the chamber was actually doing.

Phenolic liners · CC-nozzle interface · regression rigs · K-type TC · MAX31855 · Arduino DAQ · ~500 psi class

Columbia Space Initiative Rocketry — CSI Rockets propulsion programHybrid · ablatives

The shift

I helped move the team from slow, inconsistent homemade materials to a research-grade thermal protection approach for our 6-inch hybrid. That meant leading the adoption of phenolic chamber liners, designing the bonding and interface architecture for the combustion-chamber-to-nozzle transition, and treating the liner as a system, not a one-off shop experiment.

Infrastructure for truth

Testing had to be reproducible. I developed ablative regression rigs, mold and CAD tooling for aerospace manufacturing, resin-mixing protocols (resole/novolac thermosets with microballoon fillers), and thermocouple-instrumented heat-flux characterization: K-type thermocouples, MAX31855, Arduino DAQ. The point was a data-driven method for ablation rate, char formation, and thermal penetration under high pressure and extreme heat.

That pipeline is what lets a student team approach industry-standard hybrid practices: safer static fires, higher confidence before launch, and a written trail of what the material did when the chamber lit.