Store-bought Vs. Homemade (sugar) Rocket Engines (Exp. 1)
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- In this experiment video, I sought out to test the performance of store-bought rocket engines - a black powder variety - versus homemade sugar engines.
Unfortunately, I made the homemade engines with a slight mistake, and it almost certainly directly impacted the results. I'll have to redo the experiment sometime, with the correct controls.
I apologize for the quality, audio and otherwise, of this video. Many things went wrong on the day of its filming, and I had no choice but to carry on and try my best.
I've been working around 80 hours a week between my full-time job and my UA-cam channel, in order to keep my promise of uploading every week... but it's not enough. I'm doing my absolute best to keep quality and content high, so please bear with me as I continue to grow and improve. Any support, including liking, sharing, subscribing, etc., are greatly appreciated.
If I understood you correctly, you assumed that the store-bought motor shoot off from the test stand because the black powder rocket fuel was not enclosed with a clay cap at he top end of the motor. If so, then it is not the case, since each of these motors at the end of their fuel has delay mixture (since your motor is C6-0 it means there was 0 seconds of delay, i.e. no delay mix added), and on top of this mixture there is an actual cap with a small hole that separates the delay mix from the ejection charge (loose black powder). So, if you haven't removed the ejection charge yourself prior to testing the motor, it was this ejection charge that most likely ejected the motor in the air.
Just pointing it out, for future reference. Other than that, keep it up.
Hi! Sorry, which part are you referring to? Also, I just did some research on -0 Estes motors, and it appears that there is not only no delay mix, but also no ejection charge in the motor. There is a buildup of pressure and a forward release of gases and clay/BP, but I guess that's caused by just the weakening of that last disc-shaped area of fuel, thereby allowing the pressure to break through the front clay cap. Or something along those lines, I think? Here's the forum I was reading: www.rocketryforum.com/threads/does-an-estes-booster-engine-have-an-ejection-charge.23341/
@@trumpatier Yes, you are right. It seems estes motors does in fact have this configuration, which is actually quite unusual for me, since I mainly dealt with other brands of motors, that don't :D Thanks for the info!
The “0” on C6-0 engines means that they are a booster engine, the first engine in a 2 stage rocket. Not only is there no delay, there is no ejection charge. There is no end plug because the fuel is supposed to burn clear through and the flame you got (what you called an explosion) was the fuel burning through. The hot fuel and gases enter the nozzle of the next stage engine to ignite it. Please see my next comment where I answer your question on why your engine did not have much power. You are partially right. I will explain it further.
@Matthew G. You are incorrect. There was no ejection charge in this motor. “0” motors, the ones with red labels, are booster motors for multi stage rockets. The propellant burns thru the end and hot gases and burning propellant enter the nozzle of the next stage engine to ignite it.
The problem is you dont make a hole in the center of the mix :)
Yeahhh, I messed up pretty bad 🤣 I'll definitely redo this test with the correction.
@@trumpatier Wait hold on, did you not know how Rocket Motors work? Because if you did there's no way on Earth you can make this mistake. Did you just think the store bought ones had a nozzle for the fuse and that's it? So you just imitated that and thought that's how it worked. Come on man that's total Amateur hour bro.
@@patman0250 It had been a while since I made a rocket motor, so I forgot that I was supposed to drill the hole all the way. And yes, I am an amateur at making rocket motors. I've only made a couple mini ones, and that was a while before this video.
@@trumpatier well don't feel bad when it comes to this stuff we're all amateurs including me LOL
hey mate like the vid don't worry about video quality and things that don't work do like that you tell us but you show real potential keep it up and one-day NASA will call you for help well done
The ones that you made it doesn't even look like you cored your Motors. It just looks like you put a makeshift nozzle. Please don't tell me that's all you did you know you're supposed to drill a hole right. If you did you screwed up somewhere because it's not supposed to last that long burn was way too slow.
Keep it up man
ive been playing with endburners cause i want longer burn times. you made a decent endburner and a smaller nozzle may have gotten more thrust. when you make a core burner as you described make your nozzle bigger or it will kato. Its a delicate balancing act between good thrust and kato. Kudos on your work.
Nice! Are end burners viable with sugar rocket motors? The thrust seemed kind of nonexistant to me haha
@@trumpatier they arent optimal but i sorta like the slow takeoffs..sorta scale. I just keep using a smaller nozzle till i get thrust or kato. safety first of course.
Core the motor and make sure your clay nozzle and end plug are equal to the diameter of the casing. You should be easily getting over 1000grams of thrust minimum.
Yeahh that's exactly what I forgot to do haha! I forgot that I needed to drill the core entirely through the fuel, so I pretty much created an end-burner with fuel meant to be a core-burner. Thanks for the advice! So you're saying that the thickness of the clay bits should be as thick as the tube is wide?
@@trumpatier yes, exactly. The plug should be made out of bentonite clay, but modeling clay, aka the one you can shape with your hands, works just as well, but because of its weight and strength the plug should be smaller, approx 2/3s of the width of the rocket. Thanxxx
@@Fred_the_1996 good to know, thanks for the info! The clay I was using in these engines is air-dry modeling clay. It seems pretty strong
The explosions at the end of the burn of the store bought engines is a black powder charge to deploy a parachute on model rockets. The homemade engines may perform better if you add an accelerant to it like sulfur.
These rocket motors have no charge for a parachute, they're booster engines. But yeah, I'm definitely going to do some experimenting with different accelerants when I come back to this subject. Thanks for the insight!
Press or ram this composition..change rangle of mix..1/4 bp plus 3/4sugar fuel until you have decent truss
I definitely will be doing lots of experimenting on homemade motors in the future. I actually messed up this batch by forgetting to drill the core! lol
Deff got the hotdog burns mixed up it was cold to the touch because it was the wrong burn
Yeahh haha I've been told. Didn't realize it when filming this. I plan on re-doing this experiment in the future, correctly this time haha
YOU ROCK
You need to drill the hole all the way thru the fuel. Coring it will allow for faster burn.
Yep, I realized that after making this video haha. I had somehow forgotten about that crucial step!
@@trumpatier have you thought about testing them like that? I'd like to know how they stack up
@@CravenMoorhead I do plan on re-testing homemade motors, drilled correctly this time. Sadly though, I'm not able to make videos in my current situation 😔 Plus I have a couple videos planned before I go back to rocketry. But when I do return, the video will be better than ever because my quality standards have skyrocketed (no pun intended 🤣).
If you'd like an example of my new quality standards, you can check out my latest project video here: ua-cam.com/video/naYGHu9mrFM/v-deo.htmlsi=iEQCakVsAYAChQn5
When I can redo this motor experiment, I'll retrieve and discuss a lot of data to give a thorough breakdown of the comparison. Plus probably some slow-mo footage 😀
I don't know when that will be though, sorry. Life has been bad.
that white material that collected on the end of the nozzle was potassium carbonate. if you mix it with water it forms potassium hydroxide which is quite corrosive and feels very soapy. if you washed your hands and it felt soapy, its because you touched what the exhaust did
Dang! Never knew that, thanks for the warning! I stayed clear of the exhaust and threw away the burnt motors though. Is there then a chance that potassium hydroxide would form by eating an item "cooked" by the motors? When I asked online if there were hazardous chemicals created by this reaction, they said it was relatively harmless if you don't breathe it in.
@@trumpatier well yes of course hydroxide will form, the thing that was exposed to it was caked in the carbonate. just be sure to wash your hands and tools because the carbonate absorbs a shit ton of moisture, forming the hydroxide and will rust the hell out of anything metal.
@@trumpatier the reaction products are CO2, H2O and potassium carbonate which is the white of the smoke.
@@HomeGrownPyrotechnics wow. Never knew sugar rockets could be caustic, I guess I should've tried harder in chemistry 🤣 thanks a lot for the info!
Try end burner whit half sugar fuel plus red iron oxide and half of blach powder willow charcoal..miw all and press very well.nozze for half inch id. may be 3mm.
Thanks for the advice! I definitely want to use BP when I get back into rocketry on the channel.
"Thank You", thank you very much for your video 😀 Yes, I'd like a tutorial 😉
He got the hot dog burns backwards for sure. From the first two store baught tests.
Yeahhh haha someone pointed that out to me 🤣 I feel like I really rushed this video. This was when I was keeping a promise to upload once a week, so every video's quality suffered. I definitely want to remake this test and video, and expand into testing other types of motor. Thanks for watching!
Better to have fewer but better vids. I would have skipped the food angle and made new correct engines. Just my opinion
Yeah, I'm probably going to start uploading every 2 weeks once I get back into it. Trying to finish a makeshift recording booth so that recording is easier. Thanks for the input!
It was your segment on making paper tubes that led me here. I am in the process of making foundry furnaces and was thinking I might make my own custom tubes for forms. But 8 or 12 in inch tube that may be a bit labor intensive.
Don't let the lack of good equipment stop you. On the audio you can always do a voice over. On windy days that is a life saver. Most of all have fun. It shows. I need to work on that one.
@@danharold3087 Nice! Yeah, tubes that big would probably be pretty hard to make. I think I've gotten the outdoor audio issue straightened out - the power line above me was causing noise on the unbalanced cable I was using. My main issue is with voicing over.. Here in Las Vegas, the air conditioning runs far too often during the summer to get any decent bit of voice recording done 🤣
With bi-weekly uploads I should be able to be more relaxed and have fun when making videos. Definitely looking forward to uploading again. Good luck on the foundries!
Tutorial plzz
Your thought on why there was not much power was partially right. I will explain further. Sugar/KNO3 propellant is a lower powered propellant than black powder, the propellant in ESTES and other store bought rocket engines. This means to get enough power out of the fuel you have to burn it faster. You do this by exposing more of the fuel surface to be burned at one time. This is why sugar motors have a hole up through the middle, or a “CORE”. Core burning engines burn from the inside out, and consume the fuel very quickly. Most black powder motors burn from the end because black powder has more energy per ounce than sugar propellant. So the two reasons your motors did not have high energy output were you were using a lower energy propellant (lower specific impulse in engineering lingo) and the fuel was not burned at a high enough rate and pressure. I hope this is helpful. Please emphasize safety in your videos. Kids might try to recreate what you are doing, and you are opening yourself up to possible liability by not cautioning people to be safe. Best idea is a “Do not try this at home” warning.
Gotcha. Thanks for the info! I'll definitely put warnings in my future rocket videos. I thought I put one in this video but I'm probably thinking of another one.
Do you have any experience with making homemade black powder? The stuff is so expensive from gun stores!
You must make a core in your rockets
Yeah haha, I forgot to do that xD Next time I'll definitely fix it!
Not enough potassium nitrate, there's too much uncombusted material
thats not the problem, end burner sugar motors have to be really large if you want it to work. sugar motors of that size always have a core going into the fuel to increase the amount of fuel being burned at the same time. black powder which is used in the store bought one burns much faster and much differently which allows it to be used as an end burner(end burner motors burn from one side to the other, core burners burn inside out)
@@HomeGrownPyrotechnics ik, I've been building processional firework rockets for 6 years
Do more rocket fuel mean more power and thrust?
I think it all depends on chamber pressure and core size
@@trumpatier So instead of using more sugar mix if we use 2 sugar rockets, then?
@@roboarjun if you want more power, I think you have to add something to make the burn temperature hotter, thereby increasing pressure. Or you can make changes to the nozzle size. It's all about a balance of thrust and burn time, which is probably controlled by nozzle size. I'm not really knowledgeable in rocket motors, sorry!
@@trumpatier Thanks for the guidance
@@roboarjun no problem, good luck!
its really not fare to compare a sugar motor with a black powder motor. sugar motors dont work as end burners because the fuel doesnt burn fast enough.
Hi, what do you mean by end burners? My knowledge in pyrotechnics and amateur rocketry is admittedly not very good. If the fuel doesn't burn fast enough, wouldn't increasing the amount of kno3 improve that? In this test I made a HUGE mistake by forgetting to bore out the combustion chamber. So it burned from end to end, instead of from the center to outside. So it ended up being more of a smoke bomb than a rocket motor.
@@trumpatier adding more KNO3 would make it worse. the optimum ratio is 65% KNO3 and 35% sugar. adding 1% iron oxide will make it burn faster but not fast enough. i explained this a bit more in a comment i left with
'Backyard Arsenal' a few comments down. hope this helps. if you wish to learn more about rocketry, id be glad to help, mabe even put you in touch with some folks who know a hell of a lot more about it than i do.
@@HomeGrownPyrotechnics awesome! I love rocketry but tbh I don't currently have much time to delve into it. Though I am looking to redo this experiment after I finish the video that's been unfinished for months, and then do multiple videos experimenting with different homemade motor types and mixes. Thanks for offering your assistance, that's very kind!
I currently have only 1 question - do you know any good ways for an amateur to measure thrust output without breaking the bank? In this video I tried using a digital scale, but it's really not a very good option. The force only updates like twice a second, so the peak thrust can easily be missed.
Thanks again for all the info!
@@trumpatier the only reliable way to get thrust data is a load cell. this one is one i really want to get but havent yet. www.banggood.com/200KG-Electronic-Platform-Scale-Load-Cell-Pressure-Balanced-Cantilever-Load-Weight-Sensor-p-1098085.html?rmmds=mywishlist&cur_warehouse=CN
Did you ever test it a second time?
Not yet. It's in my list of videos to make, at probably number 2 or 3 in line.
Home made hunter killer drone
hey dude your ment to core that sugar rocket motor to get all of its potential thrust ... try making proper nozzles too then the exhaust nozzle wont fall to bits like it did ...... estes rocket motors are end burners where as a decent sugar motor should not be ... so really this experiment has no real basis ..... dont forget you should always play your "A" game
Yeah, I realized that later on haha. For some reason, I forgot that I was supposed to core it. Also, how would I go about making a proper nozzle for a motor like this?
@@trumpatier , there are a number of ways to make the "nozzle", but the easiest way is to use powdered kitty litter and pack it very hard where it becomes like a solid. Then, drill whatever hole size you want. Also, are you "cooking" the sugar rocket fuel? Ie, melting it and getting a homogeneous mixture?
Looks to be maybe to small of hole in the core.
The issue is that I had completely forgot to drill out the core 🤣 I was thinking that I only needed to drill a hole deep enough to insert an igniter.
@@trumpatier yeah, Black powder motors (the estes "store bought") only need the small hole. For other types you need a hole through it. Use the Estes "sonic" ignitors to push it all the way through.
@@1ello Alright, I'll check em out. Thanks for the info!
@@1ello love the name btw
You can't match your crappy bp to este powder as there's is a 75/15/10 mix ball milled press with 10 k lbs pressure. Its not a valid comparison mate I know I use to make large bo rockets lifting alot of weight.
I didn't even use black powder in this test. It's in the title.
@@trumpatier don't worry mate.