End of quarter: Water Bottle Rocket Analysis

We made sure to include a heavy top, four fins placed evenly toward the bottom, a parachute, and a cone surrounding the top. The fins were the most consistent, until one of them broke off at the end. We had the most trouble with the parachute deploying correctly. We adjusted our parachute designs a few times. The first time we made the parachute a little more circular and even, as the first parachute design was not as even. Then we launched it, and had some issues with the bottle leaking, and the parachute just not deploying. Then we removed a rock from the top to try and lighten it, in hopes of the parachute deploying. When it did deploy, it was tangled, so it didn't work so well. So we retried and folded up the parachute in a way so that it didn't get as tangled. After a few more tries, it deployed, but it got tangled up with the cone. On our last try, the rocket was pretty worn down, and fell apart in the air. I believe in order to make it work, we needed a larger parachute and maybe even longer strings.

 

In the beginning we were filling up the bottle with too much water, so in our final tries, we filled it up with a little less than half of the bottle. From what I remember I believe the psi was about 45 at one of our launches.

 

I learned that the center of gravity of the rocket has to be pretty well centered so that the rocket won't tip over, and we were able to accomplish that pretty well. Also, having four fins that were an equal distance from each other also kept the rocket balanced. Although there were many frustrating points, it was a pretty fun experiment. I definitely had the best time decorating/creating the rocket aha. c: