AE group builds first student-designed liquid rocket engine

For many students in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, getting involved in a registered student organization is an important piece of their education. It's a place where they can get additional hands-on experience outside of class. One example is a technical group in AE’s American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics student chapter which is giving its members an opportunity to build the University of Illinois’ first student-designed liquid rocket engine.

AE senior Bartosz Wielgos is the co-founder of the Liquid Rocket Initiative, leads the MK 117 team, and co-leads the structure’s team. They are currently working on three projects: GRUNT, MK 117, and a liquid rocket test stand.

“GRUNT was our first engine that we designed and manufactured on our own,” Wielgos said. “It’s UIUC’s first liquid rocket engine, and it’s our first attempt to build an engine that runs on liquid propellants which is something unique at this university. A lot of rockets run on solids here.”

The Liquid Rocket Initiative team at Illinois is not working on their projects alone. They have been working with Purdue University at the Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories to fire and test their engines. Making their own test stand, however, will allow the Liquid Rocket Initiative to fire their engines more efficiently, as they will be able to run tests here at Illinois.

“There is no infrastructure at this school for anyone who wants to work on this stuff, so it’s super time consuming, and it makes your cycle time a lot longer,” project lead Ian brown said. “What we want to do is build this test stand so we can reduce our cycle times and essentially create this program at UIUC where you can develop rocket engines with super short iteration cycles.”

Brown believes that groups like the Liquid Rocket Initiative can enrich a student’s time at Illinois with experiences they would not find in one of their courses.

“If a team of undergraduates can achieve something like this, I think it will change the way students here at UIUC think about themselves,” Brown said. “They’ll realize we actually can do things like this.”

MK117 is similar to GRUNT and will be fired off the test stand the team is working on.

“It’s smaller and more manageable,” he said. “It’ll serve as a thing we can slap onto our test stand and use to verify that our fluid, electronic, and structural systems work.”

Wielgos described how the team plans to maintain realistic goals for themselves in order to make consistent progress.

“The idea of the engine was to design something extremely simple that we could make and actually deliver on, and I think that’s a big point of our project — we say we’re going to do something and we follow through on it,” he said.

Wielgos believes working on the Liquid Rocket Initiative is the reason for many opportunities he would not have had otherwise, including the job he landed at SpaceX.

“It’s the reason I got my job. This stuff attracts a lot of unique people from the industry and from companies that really value project experience,” Wielgos said. “They love listening about what type of impact this has on college students. They thought it was a great mission and a great thing to spend our time on.”

AE first-year student Santiago Zapata Zuluaga encourages other first-year students to join the Liquid Rocket Initiative because of the hands-on work it provides. Their team is made up of 20 people. Thirteen of them are aerospace engineering students.

“Working here, I feel I am doing more because there is so few of us,” Zapata Zuluaga said. “The job is pretty spread out between the 20 of us, and our hands are getting dirty with engineering.”

Zapata Zuluaga said students of all levels of experience are welcome to join the team. He was able to collaborate with other first-year students last semester, including those with less knowledge on the subject.

“We were able to teach them the software and they still were able to contribute to the project,” he said.