In other news, a friend from uni has expressed interest in starting a small experimental rocket team to get a micro-satellite into low earth orbit, so far there around five students who expressed interest but just the two of us who actually want to get anything done. It seems that once again that the engineering students I know are all too interested in a well paid career than having any kind of affinity for engineering. Anyway a task of this magnitude would take many years, but who's to say it will never happen, all big projects had to start somewhere and other teams like Ausroc, Aspire, dutch Sub-Orbitals, Starchaser and SpaceX all started with a few interested people and big ideas. We have planned out initial project aims of building a small scale version of the liquid fuelled rocket engine, on the order of 1000N, and to have reached an altitude of 5km by December. The highest I have been before was about 1.5Km and that was with a commercial solid fuel motor and rocket this is going to be something else entirely. We have begun to put out some tentative feelers about who and how to start applying for funding or sponsorship. I have enough equipment, instrumentation and materials from previous projects to build and test a fairly large proportion of this initial stage, but there's no way we can afford the rest on our own budgets. Let alone the further stages of the project should we actually meet the objectives.
Talking of funds, well it looks like my bank account is going to take another hit because I need to buy another DAQ... Luckily with the European economies they way they are, I will be able to shave a bit off the the price. I need it because I have ten analogue signals I need to measure and thought I could use both the µChameleon and a DATAQ DAQs, but this has proved to be messy and it conflicts with my desire for everything to be symmetrical... This will also help in that I can monitor the gas and fuel solenoids, starting motor and glow plug operations easier, than trying to read these through the digital I/O channels.
Everything is coming together well now, I am starting to think about the physical test bench. I have some plans I sketched out a couple of years ago that involved the test bench mounted on a trolley with the engine operating inside a fully enclosed 'box' with the exhaust ducted out the rear. Fuel and instrumentation would be housed in separate compartments. This has the benefits of reducing noise, I know it won't be much, but even a few decibels would enough to help reduce the annoyance to the neighbours. I only wear ear defenders for the full throttle runs because I love engine noise, even high pitched rasping two-stroke engines! Another plus for this isolated engine layout, is the fact I can easily inject CO2 from a fire extinguisher should the need arise and it has on many occasions. I have set fire to the shed, my parents shrubbery, myself, in fact anything can be burned has been burned over the course of my life. The shrubbery is a particularly sore point with my mother who brings it up with anybody and everybody more than ten years after the incident. To be fair I really didn't think the exhaust from a small jet engine, without an exhaust nozzle, would be hot enough at ten feet to cook an entire bush. But I was wrong, and to top it off a bearing failure at 80,000 RPM then left pools of burning kerosene on the new block paving. I got the feeling I wasn't her favourite person that week.
Currently the dashboard in Labview looks like this. I'm still not happy with the layout, but it's getting there. Apologies for the mixture of metric and English units, That's if you noticed the temperature meters were in degrees Centigrade rather than Kelvin. I will be using this to monitor the engine in real time and my brain works best in Centigrade, especially at the higher combustion temperatures, because its the unit I use most in daily life. I only work with Kelvin when mathematics are involved. It's a bad habit I know, but I don't want to run the risk of missing something going wrong a moment before all hell breaks loose because I was confused with subtracting 273 degrees. Despite having just done a maths degree in disguise, it seems I am hopeless at simple arithmetic. I've also christened the project Ardor which is Latin for flame, burning, heat..... according to my seventeen year old, high school Latin dictionary. After my track record in testing gas turbines, I think the name is justified. There's still some things that need to be added to the dashboard, but these are simple indicators to notify me when the ECU is cycling through various start up systems. The next big job is figuring out how to export a PWM signal and adding a second vi to control another DAQ.
Judging by the amount of blog traffic I get just from people looking how to measure RPM in Labview, there must be some interesting projects out there. If you're doing something interesting let me know! I love reading about what other people are up to!
