Anchors Strong Enough to Secure a Rocket Engine Test

AEA provided four PE36 Penetrator anchors to Lassonde School of Engineering in Ontario to anchor a rocket engine test stand. According to staff, “The test went amazingly, better than we expected. Normally for a rocket engine test you do the cold flows and then you do a hot fire where the objective is to just test the ignition, so the burn duration is intended to be 2-5 seconds, just enough to get the thrust going and validate the ignition and then do another longer duration burn but it is the same logic of slowly increasing the time. We were using flight-proven hardware. The LR-101 we have is a 65-year-old engine from an ICBM so we went right for a long duration burn and we hoped for a 20 second burn. The ramp-up to full thrust happened with no issues at all and the combustion was very stable so we pushed it to 35 seconds, and if we had loaded more propellant we could have gone longer!”