Secure Hydrocarbon Propellants Storage and Receiving

Sierra Lobo has expertise in planning, receiving, storing, and delivering hydrocarbon propellants, and related gases in government facilities, such as the NASA Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Safely Developing, Managing and Testing Heated and Cracked Hypersonic Fuels

Sierra Lobo also provides our government and commercial customers with expertise in developing, managing, and testing hypersonic fuels.  In 2004, Sierra Lobo built a fuel cracker for ISTAR hypersonic testing at NASA Plum Brook’s Hypersonic Test Facility.  In 2009, Sierra Lobo was selected to reproduce a 1/6 model of this fuel cracker at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC).

This turnkey system is housed at GRC’s CE-5 Facility within the Engine Research Building. 

 

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CE-5 (http://facilities.grc.nasa.gov/erb/cells/ce5b1.html) is a high pressure, high temperature flametube/sector combustion test facility with laser diagnostic and exhaust emission measurement capability.  .

 

Sierra Lobo Technicians operate and maintain hydrocarbon refueling equipment for aircraft refueling.

The rig was activated in 2009 and achieved all of its design conditions  During testing, engineers ran fuel through the bypass line at about 1-gpm and heated the fuel to 900˚F, 1000˚F, and 1100˚F respectively, and cracked fuel in the process.  For this test, Sierra Lobo Engineers wrote a software program to model the system and were able to anticipate the pressure throughout the system at various temperatures and a constant fuel flow.

 

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Sierra Lobo’s Turnkey Jet Fuel Cracker.

 

Sierra Lobo Engineer inspecting fuel cracker rig after run in CE-5.

 

The CE-5 facility is slated to test other heated and cracked jet fuels with variable injector and combustor configurations at differing conditions in 2010 and 2011.  This Sierra Lobo-designed system will allow GRC to enter into a new arena of heated and cracked hypersonic fuels testing for near term military applications and long term commercial applications.  Leveraging this successful system, Sierra Lobo has been tapped to build a system similar to the ISTAR heater to support DARPA hypersonic testing at NASA GRC’s PSL facility http://facilities.grc.nasa.gov/psl/index.html in 2010.

 

Learn More:  Hypergols  Propellants