This project has a pending US Patent (U.S. Patent Application No.: 18/112,223)

A large fraction of the costs (80%) of building a rocket engine turbopump can be attributed to the large number of parts that exist in status-quo turbopumps, as each part has to individually traverse the supply chain and be tested within its system. A large number of the parts within a turbopump (~200) exist because of a series of turbine seals (such as purge seals) that separate fuel-rich mixtures and oxygen-rich mixutes that are flowing on opposite sides of the turbine of the turbopump.

In this projec, I came up with a new turbopump design that eliminates these 200 parts using a regenrative-cooling inspired turbopump design. Instead of physically separating the fuel rich and oxygen rich mixtures, my design uses regenerative cooling to simply keep the mixtures from reacting. A coolant (such as a fraction of the liquid oxygen from the main fuel tanks) is passed through a series of thin capillary tubes that traverse the turbopump to cool it down to a temperature that is lower than the activation energy of the reactions of the two mixtures. A valve is added on to the turbopump to control the pressures of the two mixtues to keep the point of interaction static.

Below are some articles I wrote about my though process while developing this design.