Archive for December, 2011

Tandem Balloon Burst

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

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DSS Arm

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Saturday the team inflated a five foot diameter,seventeen foot long Dark Sky Station arm. The test went really well. From what we learned we’ve made several modification to the arm ends. If it works we can pull twenty pounds out of the vehicle.

Tuning In

Monday, December 19th, 2011

We conducted two more MHD generator firing tests. Carbon plate erosion was pretty bad. No enough to cause a problem on this scale but enough that it might be on the quad engine. Doubling the plates was an easy fix but now we needed to get a new baseline in the data. The first test did just that and the data is below. The anode and cathode get ready fouled with the test motors were using. We clean them between firings on the assumption that dirty electrical probes will hurt power production.  To test that firing test 45 was done without cleaning. Power dropped off by about 3/4.  This won’t be as big of a problem with the quad engine as it should run a lot cleaner.

MHD Test 44

MHD Test 43

Friday, December 16th, 2011

In last night’s test we were looking at current under load.

We’re also honing the configuration for the MHD that will go in the quad engine.

Behind the Scenes in Japan

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

Here’s a making of video of the Samsung project. It has cool scenes from the Japanese side of the project that I’ve never scene before. It also has great recovery footage.

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Samsung Project

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Samsung has been posting some great videos of the Galaxy phone project we did for them last July.

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Why there are proceedures…

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Tonight while getting ready to test an MHD unit the rocket motor unexpectedly fired. Fortunately our test procedure calls for the battery to the motor to be hooked up only after the operator is clear. I’m not sure what caused it. A short in the ignition should only be able to result in not being able to fire. Tomorrow the troubleshooting begins.

The ceramic plates cracked on the last unit and the whole thing collapsed in on itself.  We replaced the upper ceramic plate with a carbon fiber one. We also changed the motor mount to make it easier to assemble and disassemble. The carbon plate allows the magnets to be a little closed together. I was hoping to juice a little more power out.   On the plus side the new unit held together. On the minus side the motor fired before the data logger began recording so no data. At least I was really awake for the drive home!