Kindlevan

Overview

As a lead on the Mechanical team, I led a team of ~15 people through the design, analysis, testing, and fabrication of our 2025-26 competition rocket, Kindlevan, culminating in a successful flight at the 2026 International Rocket Engineering Competition where the team placed 8th overall and 5th in category out of 141 total teams.

Building off of our success from the previous two years at the competition. Kindlevan improved our removable fins, changed the concept of operations in the nosecone, and implemented air brakes as a method of in-flight appogee control. This page outlines my specific contributions to the project. For the full breakdown on all subsystems, see the technical report below.

Technical Report

Team100_Tufts University_Project Technical Report - Tufts Rocketry.pdf

Preliminary Design Review

KINDLEVAN Preliminary Design Review

On December 7th, 2025, the team completed the preliminary design review for HODGE. I contributed to the mechanical section, which begins on slide 33. The presentation slides are provided on the left. The full presentation can be found here.

Air Brakes

Hardware

The air brakes will be used to slow Kindlevan's ascent and hit as close to 10,000 ft as possible. The air brake assembly is designed to be integrated with the aft airframe bulkhead and sit above the motor. The assembly slides into the aft airframe body tube and is secured through the wall by four screws threaded directly into the bulkhead. The airbrakes themselves are driven by a servo motor connected to a rack and pinion mechanism. The air brake computers and the servo are mounted in the space between the air brake plates and the bulkhead.

The bulkhead is made of Al 6061-T6 and is analyzed using Ansys Mechanical FEA to ensure it withstands the pressure from deployment charges and the force from parachute deployment. The bulkhead features an o-ring groove, sized to maintain pressurization of the parachute compartment during deployment.

Software and Testing

The control algorithm reads data from the two boards and applies a kalman filter to estimate the state of the rocket. This state estimation is then fed into a trajectory optimization algorithm which computes the optimal extension for the airbrakes to hit our target apogee. The algorithm itself was developed by the avionics team. To assist in the efforts, I developed a SIMULINK model for software-in-the-loop testing. The model is a 2-DOF rocket dynamics model that takes in the motor thrust as an input and computes the rocket dynamics, all while taking into account variable drag from the airbrakes and the changing mass during boost. The rocket state is fed into the control algorithm

Subscale Launch

The largest issue that we had with the airbrakes was characterizing the drag of the system in various conditions. We conducted some low-fidelity CFD and other aerodynamic simulations through RAS Aero II, but had no way of validating the results.

To solve this problem, I constructed a dynamically similar scale model of Kindlevan by matching the rocket geometry and weight distribution. The primary objective of this effort was to verify that the rocket would remain passively stable even with the airbrakes fully deployed. The secondary objective was to measure the drag on the rocket and use this to validate our models.

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