The Waterloo Rocketry Team is composed solely of undergraduate students passionate about rocket engineering. The team competes annually at the competition hosted by the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association. This year was the inaugural Spaceport America Cup, located at Spaceport America, New Mexico. With over 100 teams from universities around the world registered, it was the largest competition to date.
Whereas most teams use a relatively simple commercially purchased solid fuel engine, our team undertakes a significant challenge in designing and building our own hybrid rocket engine. Unlike a purely solid engine, a hybrid engine separates the propellants into a solid fuel and liquid oxidizer. The team's submission this year was named "Vidar III", as the third in a line of iterations aiming to incrementally improve our system. Among other developments, new for this year was a remote launch control system capable of remotely operating our entire tank fill and ignition procedure from 3000 feet, and an innovative injector design which utilized two-phase flow to decouple the feed system from the combustion chamber, thereby helping to improve combustion stability.
The team braved extreme heat and sleep deprivation to set up our custom launch tower, ground support equipment, and rocket. On the third day of launches, our rocket achieved liftoff on the first attempt. Soaring to thousands of feet above ground level, the rocket then deployed its parachute systems and floated safely back to earth, a mere 50 feet from its launch point.
At the awards ceremony, our team was thrilled to have won not only the Jim Furfaro Award for Technical Excellence above all other teams, but we also won first place in our category: 10,000 foot apogee Student Researched and Developed Hybrid/Liquid Engine. This is a result which shows the calibre of students that Waterloo Engineering has to offer.
Comments from Rocketry's Media Lead, Robin Liu:
I can speak for the team when I say that we're all incredibly happy to have achieved this result. Some of our members have been working towards this for many years, starting from their first co-op work term where they worked for the team. To win the technical excellence award and first place in our category is vindication for all of the time which we've invested. We're extremely proud to represent the University of Waterloo and Canada, and we're elated to have been able to bring some trophies home.
We want to give a nod to all of the hard work put in by past members, and especially would like to thank our sponsors and advisors. Without their support, none of this would have been possible. We also want to applaud the hard work put in by other Canadian teams. Together, Canada put up a strong showing at the competition.
We're absolutely energized by this win and already have a long list of developments to work towards for next year!