Propulsion engineer. I’ve worked on both liquid rocket engines ever static-fired in Greece.
Medusa hot fire. N₂O/IPA, regeneratively cooled nozzle.
Greece has static-fired two liquid rocket engines. The first was a copper heat-sink engine burning liquid oxygen and ethanol. The second, the country’s first with regenerative cooling, burns nitrous oxide and isopropanol.
I was on the engineering team of both.
Aristotle University student team, 2024–2025
I was the only thermal-structural analyst on the ten-person engine team, responsible for the copper chamber and nozzle and for the flight nozzle that followed. Both are below.
Independent liquid rocket program building toward a hopper, 2025 to now
On Medusa I own pieces of hardware end to end, from the first trade study to the printed part on the test stand. The nozzle’s cooling channels, the igniter, the oxidizer and fuel main-valve actuators and the pintle injector below are my work.
Each engine’s longest hot fire so far.
Medusa
Survived three hot fires of 10–12 s intact, with thrust and chamber pressure within 7% of design.
I sized the cooling channels, both their geometry and how many, through trade studies in RPA, then checked each candidate with thermal-structural analyses in ANSYS. Most of the iteration went into the hot-gas-side wall: thin enough to keep thermal stress down, thick enough not to cost cooling.
Medusa
Four ignitions out of four. Earlier designs lit between 0 and 33% of the time.
It became the team’s first ignition system we could rely on.
Medusa
The oxidizer actuator has had no failures since installation, across two static fires.
I redesigned the servo-driven actuator for the oxidizer main valve after the previous one failed to open and close it reliably. Because it worked, the fuel main-valve actuator was handed to me next. Both turn the valve through a servo-driven linkage, and I took each from CAD and motion studies in Inventor to fabricated hardware.
Medusa
2.1 kg/s of oxidizer flow against a 2.0 kg/s target, within two design cycles.
I printed four to five variants of each concept, varying hole count and size, so each cold-flow session could test several options instead of one. It is scheduled for hot-fire testing.
Medusa
Cut print time for the hot-fire pintle parts by 40%, with less powder used.
I’m one of the two operators of the team’s laser powder-bed fusion machine and the only person who generates supports, in Materialise Magics, for every printed propulsion part.
A.S.A.T.
Hardware completed a successful 3 s static fire, the first liquid rocket engine fired in Greece.
With no active cooling, the copper itself has to soak up the heat for the length of the burn. I iterated the throat wall thickness in ANSYS Mechanical to keep the gas-side temperature as low as possible while holding thermal stresses within the material’s limits.
A.S.A.T.
Confirmed thermal and structural margins for the regeneratively cooled flight nozzle, later printed in Inconel 718.
Over a six-month design cycle I mapped CFD-derived thermal loads onto the cooling-channel structure in a one-way fluid-structure analysis in ANSYS Mechanical. The method is the basis of a technical paper I’m co-authoring.
How heat treatment changes 3D-printed Inconel 718 in each build direction.
For my diploma at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki I’m running tensile and rotating-bending fatigue tests on laser powder-bed fused Inconel 718 specimens built in the X, Y and Z orientations. I compare material straight off the printer with material heat-treated to AMS 5663, to measure how much the treatment changes its behaviour along each build direction.
I finish my integrated master’s in mechanical engineering in early 2027 and I’m looking for propulsion and additive manufacturing roles. I’m an EU citizen and happy to relocate.