This blog covers the day to day progress of water rocket development by the Air Command Water Rockets team. It is also a facility for people to provide feedback and ask questions.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Reefing Parachutes

This weekend we went down to the local park to fly a pair of smaller rockets to test a couple of techniques for reefing a parachute to stop it opening too quickly during high speed deploys. The first technique used the old reefing ring approach and for the second experiment we simply twisted the shroud lines. We managed to fit in a total of 6 flights before the wind picked up.

We’ve written up the results from the experiments here:

http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day114.htm

The update includes a video that shows how the reefing works in flight.

 Reefing ring preventing the parachute from opening too quickly.

3 comments:

lucrockets said...

Hi aircommandteam, These are interesting tests that you have done with the parachutes. The reefing ring works very well. You have taken nice pictures with the camera.I hope it works well with the upcomming high pressure rockets.

George Katz said...

Thanks lucrockets. We still need to test the reefing ring at higher speeds before we use it. The next lot of tests will attempt to deploy the parachute on the way up. We'll have a back up parachute though in case the one being tested breaks.

Bournerocketassociation said...

Hi aircommand
When is the shadow going to be ready to fly??