| Date: | 3rd February 2024 |
| Location: | Whalan Reserve, Australia |
| Conditions: | Overcast |
| Members: | GK and PK |
This week we wanted to see if we could deploy a whole bunch of paper helicopters from the rocket. These are simple to make and are quite compact when folded. The idea was to place these in the space under one of the fairings and between the spliced pairs of bottles. The fairing itself would then be released at the same time as the parachute. The fairing was split in two and hinged on one of the splits. On the other end we put a piano type hinge that uses a wire as the hinge pin. This is very similar how we've done parachute deployment on boosters. The wire of the hinge is attached to the parachute shock cord. Once the parachute is deployed at apogee, and the canopy fully opens, it pulls the wire out of the hinge and releases the fairing as well as the helicopters.
The day was overcast so lots of white and grey clouds which wasn't ideal for the experiment as the helicopters were made of white paper.
The launch went well and the helicopters were released just past apogee. The strong breeze and the overcast conditions meant the helicopters drifted a long way away and so they were very hard to see in the sky.
During testing we found that some of the helicopters wouldn't open properly and would basically lawn dart down. Out of the 30 or so released, it turned out that about 1/3 of them didn't open and so there was a grouping of them down range. The others floated a lot further.
So overall the release mechanism worked, but the effect we were expecting was quite underwhelming. We will try again with bigger helicopters made of coloured paper and under more ideal blue sky conditions.
After the launch today, we helped a brewery launch a couple of rockets as a part of their new product launch. I set up the drone to be able to drop a beer can and mounted a camera on it.
I also put a camera on the rocket so that it could film the beer can getting ejected from the rocket. This shot turned out really well as the rocket had very little roll and the can was clearly visible as it was ejected near apogee. They ended up using this in their video, along with a couple of ground shots from my GoPros.
The rocket on the first launch ended up stuck in the trees. But thankfully we had the rocket retrieving pole and it was relatively easy to get the rocket down.
Here are 3 of their videos of the product launch (we helped on the 3rd video):
Again this year I had the opportunity to present a webinar to the new group of students competing in the Airbus Water rocket sloshing competition. https://sloshing.euroavia.eu/regulation-2024/ This is quite an advanced competition that I think this year has around 30 teams from all over Europe. My talk normally focuses on practical elements of building water rockets, materials choices and what what to look out for in their designs. They have to not only go as high as possible and glide as far as they can, but they also have to carry a container that is half filled with at least 500mL of water. The liquid in this container represents fuel in an aircraft or rocket and the students have to perform some kind of experiment that deals with the dynamic nature of the liquid. They do have to write up a full report and present it as well. For any of the students that sat in on the seminar, thank you for joining, and good luck with your projects.
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