There are no failed experiments, only unexpected results.
Spent much of Sunday tinkering with my prototype Electro-Magnetic Recovery Ejection System (EMRES? gotta make up something better…). This, ideally, would provide an elegant and cleaner method to kick out a parachute or separate body-segments for a dual-deployment rocket recovery system.
It did not go as I had hoped. Ideally, if something unexpected were to happen, it should have been like in the movies with me staring at a hole in the wall or ceiling and then turning to explain to the wife. Having to patch a hole in the roof would have been *awesome*. (Our roof needs replacement anyway, and I’ve done patching before).
As it was, I flipped the switch and… nothing. Verified cap charge and discharge via voltage measurement, but nada, the ironically named “Airborne” plastic container with magnets taped to it just sat there. I then took a single small neodymium magnet and tried that: it flipped off the table, but since it makes a tic-tac look like the Hindenburg, this wasn’t exactly encouraging. In the words of the Scottish chicken in Chicken Run, I “need more THROOST!”.
It’s gotta move a pound or two about a yard, with enough force to overcome both aerodynamic forces and mechanical friction. and oh yeah, I gotta do it twice. So hopefully the caps are of manageable size and weight…
But… this was valuable. I’m learning what doesn’t work, so I try try again to find what does. Different wire size, different coil windings, and then also orientations/polarities and geometries with ferrous elements as well. Many things to try, and of course bigger capacitors might help too. I’m going to review voltage/amperage and how that affects field density and size. There have been all sorts of “coil gun” projects that do this sort of thing successfully, so I’ll review them again to see if I just have an order of magnitude problem.
On the plus side, I didn’t spend money on the cap I was using, scavenging can be a good skill. The charger was the flash unit from a disposable camera, also free.
And most importantly, my wife was thrilled at me not only not puncturing the house, but also avoiding any heart stopping high voltage capacitant discharges. And she still thinks I’m smart, possibly due to the lack of profanity-inducing shocks that I managed to avoid this time.
So maybe I don’t complete this anytime soon, if I do get it to a point that it’s workable, and can mass produce it, it could be a tidy little project to sell to fellow rocketeers. No more black powder and burnt chutes! That would be awesome indeed.
