Flagship Project
Turbopump FYP
Designed, built and tested a 20,000 RPM turbopump — a Barske pump driven by a supersonic turbine — for a small liquid rocket engine. My final-year thesis, with cavitation filmed through a transparent casing.
TurbomachineryCFDTest RigThesis
NOTE: This video is better with sound!
Thesis title: Experimental and Computational Investigation of a Small-Scale Turbopump Featuring a Barske Impeller and a Supersonic Turbine.
My final-year thesis: I designed, built and tested a 20,000 RPM turbopump from first principles. A low specific speed Barske partial-emission pump driven by a supersonic partial-admission impulse turbine.
- 20,000 RPM, 200m head at 0.3kg/s of water.
- Low specific speed of 6.5, leading to the choice of a partial emission barske impeller.
- A supersonic turbine was designed and built to drive the pump, preparing for future gas-generator testing.
- For component testing, an electric motor drives the pump. A torquemeter provides accurate efficiency readings.
- Full test rig designed and built to measure flow rate, pressure and efficiency.
- Cavitation confirmed with pressure sensors and filmed through a transparent casing and frame-matched to the data: the impeller eye cavitates early and harmlessly while head stays flat, and the pump only breaks down when the diffuser throat cavitates.
- Custom data acquisition and control system built: a Raspberry Pi 5 backend talking to three ESP32-S3s over UART, a 12-bit MCP3208 ADC chain on a low-noise LDO reference, remote servo-throttled inlet/outlet valves, and a Python/Qt control GUI over UDP from the control room.
- Electronics Hardware Safety: a PILZ PNOZ X3 dual-channel safety relay with a fail-safe E-stop and overspeed trip dropping every actuator to its safe state, behind a Dyneema blast shield. Plus full risk assessment, SOPs, FMEA and an incident report.
- Pneumatic and hydraulic feed system design, with custom direct drive ball valves.
- Full data:
- Pump H-Q Curve:
- Pump efficiency curve:
