About

Desert Winds is Sunride’s first liquid fuelled rocket aimed to be launched this summer at FAR in California with a predicted apogee of 25,000 ft. We have built this rocket around a flight optimised version of our recently hot-fired Sunfire III ‘Sandy’ bipropellant engine. After hot-firing Sandy three times on 14th March 2024, the engine achieved the highest thrust out of any UK collegiate team with a thrust of 4.4kN.

This Sunfire III-F engine is aiming to achieve a thrust of 3.5kN off the pad. Desert Winds has gone from concept to launch-ready in only six months, with one failed cold flow test in April 2024 and one successful cold flow test in May 2024.

Desert Winds uses a concentric tank piston architecture and is one of the first rockets to do so in Europe. This aims to simplify the rocket and ground support as much as possible to increase the chance of success.

Testing

On April 24th 2024, the Sunfire Feed team started with hydrostatic and cold flow testing at the Buxton test site.

Three tests were carried out and for the second test, the tank held a steady pressure just above 70 bar for 30 minutes. The team then moved onto cold flow testing. Unfortunately when the tanks were disassembled, it was discovered that the inner tank had buckled.

The reason for this failiure was that half way down the inner tank, the piston parallaxed and it didn’t travel any further. This resulted in a large pressure differential and slow buckling of the tank.

After designing a new piston that is less susceptible to the previous issues, the Desert Winds team returned to Buxton blast test site on May 16th. The second cold flow test was successful, with the piston working as intended, providing 10 seconds of propellant mass flow and pressure.

This new, longer piston included wear rings as well as an extra o-ring in order to eliminate the possibility of the aluminium of the piston coming into contact with the tank and parallaxing again.

You can watch both attempts on our YouTube channel!