Rutherford is a liquid-propellant rocket engine designed in New Zealand by Rocket Lab and manufactured in the United States. It uses LOX and RP-1 as its propellants and is the first flight-ready engine to use the electric-pump feed cycle. It is used on the company's own rocket, Electron. The rocket uses a similar arrangement to the Falcon 9, a two-stage rocket using a cluster of nine identical engines on the first stage and one, optimized for vacuum operation with a longer nozzle, on the second stage. The sea-level version produces 24 kN (5,400 lbf) of thrust and has a specific impulse of 311 s (3.05 km/s), while the vacuum optimized-version produces 24 kN (5,400 lbf) of thrust and has a specific impulse of 343 s (3.36 km/s).
It was qualified for flight in March 2016 and had its first flight on 25 May 2017.
Video Rutherford (rocket engine)
Description
Rutherford, named after renowned New Zealand born British scientist Lord Rutherford, is a small liquid-propellant rocket engine designed to be simple and cheap to produce. It is used as both a first-stage and as a second-stage engine, which simplifies logistics and improves economies of scale. To reduce its cost, it uses the electric-pump feed cycle, being the first flight-ready engine of such type. It is fabricated largely by 3D printing, using a method called electron-beam melting. Its combustion chamber, injectors, pumps, and main propellant valves are all 3D-printed.
As with all pump-fed engines, the Rutherford uses a rotodynamic pump to increase the pressure from the tanks to that needed by the combustion chamber. The use of a pump avoids the need for heavy tanks capable of holding high pressures and the high amount of gas needed to pressurize them and replaces them with a pump.
The pumps (one for the fuel and one for the oxidizer) in electric-pump feed engines are driven by an electric motor. The Rutherford engine uses dual brushless DC electric motors and a lithium polymer battery. It is claimed that this improves efficiency from the 50% of a typical gas-generator cycle to 95%. However, the battery pack increases the weight of the complete engine and presents an energy conversion issue.
Each engine has two small motors that generate 50 hp (37 kW) while spinning at 40 000 rpm. The first-stage battery, which has to power the pumps of nine engines simultaneously, can provide over 1 MW of electric power.
The engine is regeneratively cooled, which means that it first passes the fuel through channels that cool the combustion chamber and nozzle before injecting them for combustion.
Maps Rutherford (rocket engine)
See also
- Curie (rocket engine)
- Merlin (rocket engine family)
References
External links
- Rocket Lab Propulsion Section
Source of article : Wikipedia
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