Noah Haeske Mechanical Engineering

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Cold Flow Test Platform

Cold flow testing is how you find out whether a propulsion system's plumbing behaves before there is anything combustible in it. That only works if you can see what happened, which makes the instrumentation as much of a design problem as the structure holding it.

The vertical integration and cold flow test platform set up outdoors at night: vehicle stage on a rail, instrumented control panel with pressure gauges, compressor, and control cabinet
Fig. 1  The cold flow setup for a night test. The vehicle stands vertically on the rail at the left, propellant loading infrastructure next to it, and the data acquisition cabinet on the far right.

Role

Organization
Florida Rocket Lab, University of Florida
Role
Flight Vehicles Engineer
Duration
August 2025 – present
Tools
Ansys Mechanical, Python, DAQ instrumentation

Instrumentation as the design problem

I designed a vertical integration and cold flow test platform that captures pressure, thermal, and vibration data from twelve individual sensors, and wrote the Python pipeline that synchronizes and processes those multi-channel streams into dashboards the team can actually read. Raw multi-channel DAQ output is close to useless in a debrief; the value is in getting every channel onto a common clock and putting the anomaly in front of the person who needs to see it.

I am continuing as test vehicles lead, running a team of four engineers to instrument and fly the subscale test vehicle.

Fig. 2  Cold flow, filmed at the base of the stage. The vapor cloud is the working fluid venting through the feed system.
Fig. 3  Launch.
← All projects Current project: supersonic active control testing vehicle →

Contact

Email
noah.haeske@ufl.edu
Phone
407-705-9895
Resume
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