Compressed Air Rocket Launching

Bunch of my friends and I had to build a rocket powered by air. The design called for the use of a two-liter bottle on the end of a pipe that, when stomped on, would shoot a paper rocket off of the other end. Very basic. We were not satisfied with this simple design and set off to make our own.

What we did instead was take a length of pipe and slide a bottle onto the end of it. This serves as the rocket. When we had it positioned how we wanted, we marked the spot where the bottom of the bottle was and melted that section of pipe, making it bulge out so that the bottle would create an air-tight seal around it when pressed on. Using zip ties and another small section of pipe, we created a make-shift trigger, so that we could build up the pressure inside and then launch whenever we wanted. We then took a valve from an old bike tire and secured it to the opposite end of the pipe, sealing the inside.

With that complete, we are able to attach a bike pump to the valve and pump air into the pipe. In the earlier videos, before we had a pump with a pressure gauge on it, we were not getting much psi - probably around 50, max. However, with the pressure gauge, we know that we were getting around 115 PSI - that was generally where air started leaking from around the seal between the bottle and the pipe.

We would either launch with the bottle 1/2 full of water, or with just air. The water made it launch slower, but maintain its speed longer as the water shot out, whereas just air is much more explosive, causing the bottle to shoot off the pipe very quickly but then spin out almost immediately. Regardless, the water and steam shooting out from the pipe during the launch made all of them look pretty cool.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• rocket
• rockets
• air
• compressed
• launch
• launcher
• launching
• compress
• pump
• bottle
• awesome
• amazing
• slow
• fast
• psi

[doodyl9]

Pretty cool.

[Costas1998]

noobs

[cleocool]

HELL YEA LIQUID TENSION EXPERIMENT!!!

[mygaboo]

thanks for the how-to write up. fav'd

[MisterSnig]

Again, Oscar's laugh at :06.

Priceless.

[utellmewhat2do]

Cooliotasticness i like teh song d: