Flometrics is a

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

based engineering company that was formed in the garage of Dr. Steve Harrington in 1990. The engineers specialize in

thermodynamics Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of the ...

and

fluid dynamics In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids— liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including ''aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) an ...

, but were widely publicized for launching a rocket running on a

biofuel Biofuel is a fuel that is produced over a short time span from biomass, rather than by the very slow natural processes involved in the formation of fossil fuels, such as oil. According to the United States Energy Information Administration (E ...

"developed by the EERC under a

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

contact."

Bio-fuel Rocket

In July 2009 the Flometrics team launched a Rocketdyne LR-101 engine running on bio-fuel developed by the

Energy and Environmental Research Center The Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) is a research, development, demonstration, and commercialization facility for energy and environment technologies development. The center is a nonprofit division of the University of North Dakota, ...

. The fuel ended up pushing the rocket close to Mach 1 and sending it 20,000 ft into the sky. The fuel was developed with the military grade

JP-8 JP-8, or JP8 (for "Jet Propellant 8") is a jet fuel, specified and used widely by the US military. It is specified by MIL-DTL-83133 and British Defence Standard 91-87, and similar to commercial aviation's Jet A-1, but with the addition of corrosio ...

fuel criteria in mind. The rocket was originally designed for use on

Mythbusters ''MythBusters'' is a science entertainment television program, developed by Peter Rees and produced by Australia's Beyond Television Productions. The series premiered on the Discovery Channel on January 23, 2003. It was broadcast internatio ...

and for

RP-1 RP-1 (alternatively, Rocket Propellant-1 or Refined Petroleum-1) is a highly refined form of kerosene outwardly similar to jet fuel, used as rocket fuel. RP-1 provides a lower specific impulse than liquid hydrogen (LH2), but is cheaper, is st ...

kerosene based rocket fuel. "This is a unique opportunity for the EERC's renewable fuel," said EERC Director Gerald Groenewold. "Our fuel is already providing a pathway to energy security to the U.S. military and now is becoming an option for ground-to-air missiles and even space flight."

Appearances

The Flometrics staff, especially Dr. Steve Harrington, has made multiple appearances in television and other media outlets.

UFO Hunters

UFO Hunters, a History Channel "''Hoax or History?''" show about the science of UFOs, aired an episode about possible underwater alien bases that featured Dr. Harrington and the Flometrics team. The engineers were presenting a set of theories and tests that could possibly explain a mystery about UFOs entering masses of water without making a noticeable splash. The first experiment to test this observation was done by creating a model UFO and attaching air jets around the model to simulate a "force field" that changes the density of the water as the craft enters the water, minimizing the splash. Flometrics also experimented with a

hydrophilic A hydrophile is a molecule or other molecular entity that is attracted to water molecules and tends to be dissolved by water.Liddell, H.G. & Scott, R. (1940). ''A Greek-English Lexicon'' Oxford: Clarendon Press. In contrast, hydrophobes are no ...

coating on the surface of the UFO. Both tests proved reasonably unsuccessful at minimizing the splash.

Popular Science

Flometrics was mentioned in " Popular Science's" ''100 Best Innovations of the Year'' issue in December 2009 for their use of "Eco Jet Fuel". The fuel was developed by "scientists at the University of North Dakota's

and is a vegetable oil that is nearly identical to military-grade

. Flometrics used this fuel to launch a 20-foot rocket 20,000 feet into the air and ran similarly to a rocket using

refined kerosene fuel. This eventually gave them publicity with the

Discovery Channel Discovery Channel (known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery) is an American cable channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav. , Discovery Channe ...

, as the rocket was originally built for testing with the Mythbusters.

Discovery Channel

Originally, the bio-fuel rocket was intended for an episode of Mythbusters that was testing whether or not the Confederate Army built and launched one of the first missile rockets. Unfortunately, the rocket was not needed and therefore wasn't used. So the Flometrics team decided to turn it into a bio-fuel rocket. Coincidentally enough, Discovery Channel held on to Flometrics and published an article about the technological advancements of the bio-fuel rocket.Discovery News
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Notable Technologies

Pistonless Pump

The

Pistonless pump A pistonless pump is a type of pump designed to move fluids without any moving parts other than three chamber valves. The pump contains a chamber which has a valved inlet from the fluid to be pumped, a valved outlet – both of these at the botto ...

is a low pressure pump system originally designed to support NASA projects with the

Crew Exploration Vehicle The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) was a component of the U.S. NASA Vision for Space Exploration plan. A competition was held to design a spacecraft that could carry humans to the destinations envisioned by the plan. The winning design was the ...

. The CEV needed to be safe with low pressure systems.

References

{{Reflist Engineering companies of the United States Companies based in San Diego