LRE GEN4 | Experimental Cooling

Placeholder Image of Throat Cooling Channels, courtesy of Ursa Major

LRE GEN4 is SFU Rocketry’s next step into a higher thrust class — a 10 kN liquid bipropellant engine designed to evaluate non-traditional cooling methods. The goal is to explore simpler alternatives to regenerative cooling while still handling significantly higher thermal loads than previous engines.

GEN4 is fully instrumented, with sensors throughout the engine to capture pressure, temperature, and heat flux data. This allows us to directly validate thermal models and better understand how these alternative cooling strategies behave at scale.

As the largest engine we've built so far, GEN4 also helps us gain experience with new design challenges — higher flow rates, larger hardware, and more demanding structural loads — all of which feed into the long-term goal of developing a regeneratively cooled engine.

---

First Hotfire Test: December 2025