Mach 30 has started to use agile methodologies to manage its engineering projects, and the first of those to use an agile approach is the Yavin cold gas thruster. This last week, we completed our first sprint, and we’re all very pleased with the results.
For anyone that might not yet know about the project, it’s to develop a test stand connected to a source of pressurized gas, such as an air compressor, where different designs for the thruster can be tested. One of the aims for the project though is to develop and test new tools for future Mach 30 projects, such as CadQuery and our new Mathematics Tool Kit (MTK), a piece of software to make it easier to compile documentation around science and math proofs and analyses. We’re not only working to further develop these tools, but putting together a tool-chain for future design efforts. How this tool-chain works for Yavin is that we’re using MTK and a Python library to document and calculate aspects of the thruster such as wall thickness and nozzle shape. We can then create models with the same library in CadQuery, and export the model to be 3D printed.
In the first sprint, we took on 3 main items. The first of these was an export control review of the project, which can be found under the project’s Wiki on Open Design Engine. Second was a structural analysis of the gas chamber before the nozzle. The team generated a number of artifacts for this, including a document created with MTK detailing the analysis, a python library to support it, and an initial model created using CadQuery. You can see pictures of the model below, but the coolest part is that we printed it!
This is just a proof of concept model though (it’s huge, and not an ideal size at all!). There’s a lot more work to be done! We have to produce another (or add to the existing) library to do the actual thruster design, and a number of other tasks. Some work to do to make it so that CadQuery supports all the functionality we’ll need for making a good performing nozzle, but we also have a number of tasks ahead focused around testing.
For transparency, there’s one more item we had planned on doing, and that was performing a test calibration on a volunteer’s 3D printer. Doing so helps us to build up information about how to calibrate other printers for printing future Yavin thruster nozzles. We don’t just intend for Mach 30 to print these, we intend for all sorts of people to do so, so we’re trying to make it as easy as possible on our end to print one of these.
We feel we accomplished a great deal for our first sprint, and we’re all very proud. If you care to hear more about our first sprint, you can check out our sprint review and retrospective here.
