Ostia

Everything NEAL builds ends up bolted down and fired horizontally. Ostia is the infrastructure for that: a modular welded-steel stand that holds Remus on a linear rail, takes its thrust through a pair of load cells into a gusseted wall, and records the burn.

I designed the structure in SolidWorks for 1,000 lbf of thrust at a 2.5 factor of safety and analysed it in Ansys. The thrust wall and gussets pass with room to spare. The load-cell flexures and the 1/4 in base plate fall short of 2.5, so the load-cell mounting and the rocket clamp are being redesigned; the results shown are for the stand as drawn.

The stand carries a 2,000 lbf load cell on the thrust axis and thermocouples on the chamber, logged at 1 kHz. That is fast enough to capture the ignition transient and the shape of the thrust curve, which is what closes the loop back to the injector models.