Steam rocket project

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Johansson
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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Tue Dec 01, 2009 5:56 am

A couple of weeks we started to build a safety valve for the steam rocket, I finished it yesterday and put some paint on it. Next weekend we are planning to test it to find out what the pressure range is.
ventil 1.JPG
Ventil 2.JPG

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Thu Dec 03, 2009 6:01 am

Olov brought the rocket kick to the workshop yesterday and fitted the safety valve, he also made some dry-run tests to find out the optimal driver position...
Olov-provgasar.jpg
safety valve fitted.JPG

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by metiz » Thu Dec 03, 2009 11:06 am

Johansson wrote: he also made some dry-run tests to find out the optimal driver position...
That'd be about 10 meters away from the thing right? :wink:
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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Fri Dec 04, 2009 6:43 am

metiz wrote:That'd be about 10 meters away from the thing right? :wink:
Ha, I´ll tell that to Olov... :mrgreen:

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:12 pm

I reached 105 km/h on the lake today, hoooray! :mrgreen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG0Rq-FiHBQ

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Viv » Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:21 pm

Hi Anders

Top man! that thing hauls ;-)

Viv
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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:57 pm

Yeah, I had to hold on good for sure.

At the starting moment you can see the front of the kick leaving the ground for a short period, with 90kg thrust and a total weight of 120kg with me included it is tends to go in the direction it is pointing. I wonder how it fast it would go if I had run it at 50bar as I was supposed to, a coupling started to leak so we decided that 40bar was enough.

Sorry for the Swedish text by the way, we had our fellow nordic racers in mind.

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by metiz » Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:15 pm

That's.....one of the coolest things I've seen :D awesome work!
Now bolt on that Thunderchine!
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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by ace_fedde » Sun Dec 06, 2009 9:36 pm

Hahaha!! Whoah!! Hahaha!! Speechless!!
Your scepticism is fuel for my brain.

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by tufty » Mon Dec 07, 2009 6:44 am

Anders, you're a fucking madman.

Can I have a go?

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by metiz » Mon Dec 07, 2009 8:27 am

tufty wrote:Anders, you're a fucking madman.

Can I have a go?
2nd.
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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Mon Dec 07, 2009 12:18 pm

Sure thing guys, next weekend perhaps? :wink:

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by ace_fedde » Mon Dec 07, 2009 3:22 pm

That's gonna be a long hot winter...
I mean, for the legs :lol:
Your scepticism is fuel for my brain.

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Mon Dec 07, 2009 5:55 pm

ace_fedde wrote:That's gonna be a long hot winter...
I mean, for the legs :lol:
Actually the steam ejected from the nozzle is pretty cold, I guess that the pressure drop and rapid vapourisation of the overheated water gets the temps down very fast. You get a bit wet though... :mrgreen:

My 0-100km/h time was in the region of 5.5s, just before I hit the snow line on the lake the speed started to drop so I used a timing clock while watching the video to find it out. Not bad at all for a bucket of water.

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Re: Steam rocket project

Post by Johansson » Fri Dec 11, 2009 6:18 am

An interesting thing I noticed that day was that the slow ramping down of thrust is completely gone, the G-forces makes the water inside the tank pool up against the nozzle so it accelerates just as hard all the way until it runs out of water.

During the static tests there were no G-forces acting on the water so once the water level got lower than the nozzle throat steam started to mix with the ejected water, that is why the thrust went down after a few seconds.

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