Fueling Dreams: The Dare Stratos V Journey to Flight

DARE Stratos V is the flagship student rocket team of the Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering student association. For generations we have been pushing the boundaries of what a dream team is believed to be capable of. The Sparrow team paved the way for Stratos V by designing our very own rocket engine and now the time has come to make it fly.

The team is comprised of over 80 students from various universities in Delft. The majority of the members study aerospace at Delft University of Technology, but there is no shortage of electrical engineers either. The Electronics & Control department has 11 people working on a large variety of systems, ranging from avionics to data analysis tools and ground control interface applications.

The primary goal this year is to finish most of the avionics ahead of testing campaigns. We need to slowly replace the functionality of the current ground control system with our own technology in order to validate it. A specific crucial technology that has to be implemented is dynamic pressure regulation. The team is steadily progressing towards achieving these goals thanks to the PCB’s from EuroCircuits. Particularly, the Engine Control Unit (ECU), consisting of 2 board stacks responsible for valve actuation and sensor monitoring, is nearing completion.

Each of these stacks is composed of one or more of each of the following boards:

•  Controller board
• Pressure sensor board
• Thermocouple board
• Actuation board

Some recent updates include adding a diode for each actuator to help dissipate the residual charge, decreasing the actuation interval. The valves can be opened in a shorter time, and the active pressure regulation we are developing is more accurate. The functional actuation frequency is now nearly 100Hz.

We need active pressure regulation to ensure enough pressure to push the propellants into the engine in the correct ratio while preventing damage to the tanks. This is a delicate process, and we successfully validated the control loop during a recent testing campaign. We are glad to be able to depend on the reliability of quality PCBs from EuroCircuits during the entire development and testing cycle.

The dynamic pressure regulator is required for a test rocket the team is currently working towards launching, Stratos V Pathfinder 1. This test is needed because of the many complex systems that require validation. The primary purpose of Pathfinder 1 is to test and validate the engine in flight and gain valuable experience for the team.

Thanks to EuroCircuits we get high-precision PCB’s delivered quickly, allowing us to keep up a high-paced development cycle. The tools provided by them have proven themselves an effective way of verifying our work. EuroCircuits has been a trusted partner of Stratos V and prior teams for 7+ years and we hope many more in the future.

We would like to thank EuroCircuits for their support!