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04/27/07 - Solid motor mixing and lab re-opening
Work has been halted recently due to a prolonged lab closure because of some safety issues, mainly a faulty fire alarm system. And by prolonged, I mean for the past 6 weeks. It has thereby been a very inefficient work month, with not much tangible progress. So what progress was made then? Obviously not a lot of attention was paid to the website... but we did get all of our ordering done. However, without a labspace to store it in, my graduate office has been a little more cluttered than usual. Besides that, we did start the motor propellant mixing by testing some small batches of ammonium perchlorate / aluminum / hydroxl terminated polybutadiene (HTPB). Our off-campus mixing setup seems to be working well for us, and we're hoping to have some small "H" sized motor grains ready for testing by the end of April. The test stand is nearing completion, and will accomodate a variety of motors. The only limiting factor on it is that we bought a 1,000 lbf load cell, which should suit us for up to perhaps a medium "N" motor. Beyond that and we will need to swap in a new load cell. We also purchased a 1,000psi pressure transducer, but may have run into a bit of a snag with using it. Our original plan was to tap a hole in the top of the motor end closure and attach that to a snubber (protects the transducer from pressure spikes), which is directly connected to the pressure trandsducer. However, normally there is a smoke charge located at the end of the motor, which just so happens to get in the way of the pressure transducer. Our current fix is to drill a hole through said smoke charge and see if it works out. If anyone else has any better ideas, please email Daedalus team member "Freshman" at vnom37@gmail.com .
For the past several weeks we have concentrated on motor mixing, and it is going very well thus far. Given any luck, we will have the M motors ready to go in another month, just in time for the launch. Besides that, we have all the components necessary sitting around to put the all carbon fiber and fiberglass rocket together. No real technology hurdles on the rocket other than the structure; the rest is all tried and true tech to ensure we get this rocket back. The last competition saw the destruction of two hybrids rockets due to recovery problems, and we are just not willing to try anything all too unique in favor of recovering our equipment.
And in other news, the ESRA University rocket competition venue has been changed to Green River, Utah, and will be hosted by Utah State University. No complaints here... it cuts our travel time in half and lessens our total trip time by a few days.
~ James Kendall Villarreal; Project Director