2022-05-04 LAB Meeting notes

Date

May 4, 2022

Attendees

• @James May (RIT Student) 

• @Brahm Soltes (RIT Student)

• @Kenny Kim (RIT Student) 

• @Paige Elias (RIT Student) 

• @Wynter Brigitta-Maita (RIT Alumni) 

• @Domenic Cacace (RIT Student) 

• @Grace Dertinger (RIT Alumni) 

Goals

• Get actionable steps to get trainings, testing, & lab access

• Simulations/Calculations

  • High-level Full Rocket CFD to find max drag

  • Snatch Force verification

  • Shock Cord maximum snatch force

  • Component verification

  • Bulkheads FEA

  • Nose cone CFD

  • Fin FEA/CFD

  • Free Body Diagrams of individual components during launch and recovery

  • Falling speeds to ensure there is no collision during recovery

• Testing

  • Rocket epoxy connection (verification of assumed connection strength)

  • Metal to CF bond

  • CF to FG bond

  • Blue tube to FG

  • Blue tube to CF

  • Thermal expansion of interfaces and what the implications are

  • Heat energy generation from COTS solid motors

  • Find Material properties of layup airframe using tensile or compression testing

  • Recovery deployment charge testing

Discussion items

Roll Call

• Launch

  • James May

  • Brahm Soltes

  • Domenic Cacace

  • Alex Speyer

  • Grace Dertinger

  • Paige Elias

  • Kenny Kim

• LAB:

  • Mike Buffalin

  • Bob Carter

  • Wellin

Abbreviated Transcript

• Confluence might be going away next year

• Introductions of Launch members

• Launch mission statement: "end goal of launch is to have a liquid rocket space shot"

• Starting off with next steps and actionable items

• Wellin: You are an official RIT club team, where is your funding coming from?

  • James: A little bit from the college, some cooperate sponsors via material and funding, crowdfunding

  • Wellin: Where are you housed?

    • James: Right now no home, the SHED will be the home once it's finished. We have been working in the Construct and store things in the basement

  • Wellin: Are all the teams competition related?

    • James: We have Space Race, IREC, propulsion R&D, avionics R&D

  • Wellin: Of the projects on the website, which ones are you working on? What is RL-36? VOID? FL-1? Ground station? Tuatara? 

    • James: Liquid team is designing that and FL-1. VOID is the IREC rocket

  • Wellin: Is the solids team a thing?

    • Grace: We just got started and we're working with 

    • Wellin: If you have any connection with Launch at all but you do things that are unsanctioned for, that's the fastest way to get cancelled. I don't want to want to be involved and be associated if I don't know what's going on. Liquids should not be no development, like no building and testing. You can't use equipment that RIT paid for. 

    • Grace: There is no testing going on for liquid prop

    • Wellin: This is a condition for my involvement here. Everything must be proper

    • Grace: We want to learn and do everything the safest way possible, your concern is valid

    • Mike: Would it make sense for LAB to be strictly IREC?

    • Wellin: I don't know if this is more of an advisory or consultative role

    • Mike: Let's go over the discussion items so we can decide if it's more advisory or consultative

• Wellin: What are the elements of the competition?

  • Brahm: There's a bunch of awards, there's a technical report, launch criteria, presentation.

  • Wellin: So it's a very cumulative score

  • Grace: Yep. So with your help, we need more knowledge

  • Wellin: What's the history of success?

  • Brahm: The first year we went, we got 11th, then in 2019 it exploded on the pad, then COVID, then 15th place with Blackout. The competition has grown a lot, the teams are a lot more competitive

  • Wellin: What are you trying to do to stay competitive?

  • Brahm: Last year, we did custom body tubes, custom payload, improving on avionics.

  • Wellin: Would SRAD or liquids be better?

  • Brahm: SRAD is a little less competitive. Liquids have a huge amount of expertise 

  • Wellin: Why try to win in something that's easier? Why not focus all your efforts on the competition?

• Grace: The other teams aren't diverting resources. We need your help with these technical things

  • Wellin: I know nothing about IREC. We can help looking through the report.

  • Mike: Are any of these development points for this year's report?

  • Grace: No, but it will help with next year. 

  • Mike: A good start is testing rocket epoxy - is that even the best material to use?

  • James: We don't know. Can you help use do tensile test.

    • Wellin: I don't know how much material testing equipment we have left. MET might have some

    • Mike: There is a plastics lab

  • Mike: What CFD are you doing?

    • Brahm: Simscale, Ansys Fluent

    • Mike: What do you want with that CFD

    • Brahm: We've been doing it for small components to get drag, but we haven't done anything for the full rocket

    • Wellin: Are you doing compressible? Are you doing sub or supersonic? And you wrote you want to do wind tunnel testing?

    • Mike: The only wind tunnel on campus does like 90 mph? How much testing do some teams do?

    • Brahm: Some teams do nothing, especially if it's COTS. Others do a lot, including even vibration testing. Two years ago, there was a team that did a turbine.

  • James: What are our action items then?

    • Wellin and Carter: Taking a look at other technical reports will really help us.

    • Brahm: There's a good list of previous technical reports. 

    • Mike: Definitely do the epoxy tensile tests

    • Wellin: Figure out what test you want to do and what kinds of standards you want to follow.

    • James: We'll do our research, you guys [LAB] reach out to the labs needed, and we'll meet in two-weeks time

    • Mike: Depending on the stresses in flight, 3-point bending might be good too

    • Wellin: You should talk to Formula, they do tests every year

    • James: I'll be here over the summer, we'll meet then.

    • Brahm: We want to also do deployment charge testing

    • James: We do these static tests for deployment charge testing, we would like to do it on campus but that gets complicated with black powder

    • Wellin: What are you doing for avionics testing? Is avionics being developed?

    • James: It's mostly COTS components

    • Brahm: Custom electronics are not allowed for deployment according the IREC rules

    • Mike: I'll work with EH&S and public safety about the black powder thing

    • James: For any single energetic device, it should be less than 5 grams of black powder

  • Grace: I'll send an email with what we discussed and the action items, but let's do one more action item

    • Brahm: I think the thermal expansion and loss in strength is important. Since we'll be in New Mexico, it will get really hot

    • Wellin: So the best case scenario is to hit exactly 10,000 ft?

    • Brahm: Yes, and you can only control roll, no other active controls

    • Grace: If you guys could look up more about IREC, that would be great

    • James: We should also prepare something for you to explain the parts of the rocket

    • Brahm: Circling back, on thermal tests, we thought about even putting the rocket in an oven

    • Grace: So we need to tell them what items exactly we want to do that heat tests for

    • Mike: The plastics lab has an oven with a tensile tester in it

    • Carter: What size of oven do you need?

    • James: Minimum is probably a 7-inch tube

    • Brahm: One thing we could do is firing a COTS motor and looking at the heat coming off of the casing

    • James: That's a Scott Williams thing, not tot relevant now. But we do want to test if the couple tube fit is affected by heat expansion

    • Carter: There's also heat testing you can do with the electronics and batteries.

    • Wellin: And the composites can be tested for heat

  • James: Is another meeting in 2 weeks time good?

    • Carter & Wellin: Yeah that should be good for us.

Action items