Acrylic Hybrid Rocket

Check out this a video from Ben Krasnow on YouTube. This is the first I’ve heard of him, but he seems to be a tinkerer and a maker based on the rest of his channel. Here he’s demonstrating a hybrid rocket engine that’s fueled by acrylic and gaseous oxygen that he built himself. It makes for a super cool demonstration because he’s able to throttle the combustion process with the oxygen valve and you can see the burn happen through the clear acrylic. The engine is incredibly simple and amazing at the same time. Building and playing with one of these really should be integrated into a school curriculum somewhere if we’re serious about jump starting our Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education. This is the stuff that captures peoples’ imaginations which then get crushed when they go to college and have to spend all night doing over-idealized calculations on hilariously impractical situations like cooling a live electrical wire in oil.


Source: Ben Krasnow on YouTube