Friday, January 18, 2013

What I learned

During this Project I learned things from how to make a rocket to what forces act on the rocket while its flying through the air.
I learned that in order to make a rocket that can fly and crash without killing the passenger you need to really think about the physics that goes into building the rocket. Such as Impulse and momentum and Newtons laws of Motion. I had a lot of fun constructing and learning about Rocket science. 

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Results

During our final Launch we added 700 mL of water to our bottle rocket.  We adjusted our angle to 45 Degrees (in order to get the parachute to deploy) 
It launched and reached around 35 meters just enough to pass and our egg survived because of the increased impulse time. Everything seemed to go right except the parachute, the parachute did not deploy unfortunatly but that is ok.

Egg Protection

During our 2nd launch of our rockets we used percaution when it came to protecting the egg.
In order to make sure the egg does not break we needed to increase the time of the impulse. Impulse is the force it takes to stop an object in motion. If you increase the time it takes to stop the object the less force acts on it. Because of this "smaller force" the egg survives.
In order to create this longer period of time we surrounded the egg by cotton balls.

Physics of Rocket

In the making of our rocket we discovered in order to make a bottle rocket you need 4 things: Two 2 Liter soda bottles this will be your rocket and your nose cone area, You will need to make fins out of any hard material we used cardboard nd CD's, number three! H2O you need water to power your rocket so it will launch into the sky and orbit! (or crash and kill your egg..) and finally.. Air Compression.  Without Air Compression your 2 liter bottle rocket is just a sad excuse for a cool looking soda bottle.  Newtons first Law of motion states that An object at rest will stay at rest until an outside force acts on it.  This outside force is the Water and Compressed Air, they act like Engine fuel.  The other side of Newtons First law is that an object in motion will stay in motion until an outside force acts upon it.  The outside force in this scenario is Gravity and Air resistance, in order to defeat air resistance on will need Fins attached to ones rocket providing aerodynamic procedure of air passing by the rocket (in other words to push the air away from the denser parts of the rocket.  As for gravity we used gravity to our advantage by making a parachute because of the gravity and air resistance we have on earth a parichute is the only safe way to fall from high distances and not die.

Rocket Construction

During the construction of our first rocket, we used a simple design to measure what angle we should use.  We did not use an egg.
The Second Rocket"s" that we built consisted of testibg fins and landing procedures such as (card board, plastic and hard paper as well as using a parachute.
Our third and final Rocket consisted of CD fins a Folder cone nose and a parachut my partner built.

Rocket Science!

What is the best angle to launch my Bottle Rocket?
We found out after our 3 Test Launches that the best angle for a simple rocket with Sustainable fins in between 30 and 38 Degrees (given that you dont want your passenger [the egg] to crack and break.  Between these angles, when your Rocket is launched, there is little to no probability of your rocket top sizing and Nose diving into the Ground.

In Order to protect and assure the safety of the egg what insulation/protection should we use inside the rocket.
This task was rather easy.  We first tested an egg surrounded by paper towels and a plasticbag... it was scrambled... On our second launch we launched our egg in a plastic bag surrounded by Cotton balls in the front of the rocket in the nose cone, this was a success but for extra safety my Partner surrounded our third and final egg in a Styrofoam case and the surrounded it by cotton.  When we lauched the landing was hard and impulsive.. but our egg survived.