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Week 13 Famous Last Words - Shock (Diamonds) and Awe!

This week has been busy, but in a very good way. I’ll start by talking about my capstone and that is likely the majority of what I will talk about in this Famous Last Words. So we finally got our system up and running. Our air compressor finally got wired up, we finally finished leak testing, and we finally go to actually test our system. And it works! Amazingly Well! I felt so much relief after our first successful test. We had a few bumps getting to that test, but they weren’t anything we couldn’t handle.

So firstly we had to replace a line that burst way below it’s rated pressure. We ended up finding some steel tubing since that would be able to withstand the heat. We got that hooked up and leak tests were smooth from that point forward.

Actual testing went super smoothly. We got air through the system with no problems, and out data acquisition is working well. I can’t put into words how excited and relieved I am that everything is working. The coolest part is we got out schlieren photography working. Schlieren photography is a technique that allows you to see pressure waves. So basically it allows you to see changes in air. It is beautiful. One of those types of images from our tests is shown below.


De Laval Cold Gas Nozzle Schlieren Photography Image
Source: The University of Oklahoma Aerospace Rocket Capstone Spring 2018

The crosses you see are called mach diamonds. Essentially those are shock waves caused by air moving faster than the speed of sound and a bunch of other reasons. 

Other than that, this week has been really chill. My robot did well for lab so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. D&D went pretty well this week. Unfortunately, my allergies were really bad that day and I had to take a benedryll to stop sneezing which made me super tired. I didn’t get to enjoy the session as much as I wanted to, but it was still fun!


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