Rocket Air-Brakes

Preliminary Design

We employed an air-brake system into our rocket in order to achieve the required altitude. On top of this, to control our descent time we also incorporated a winch system to adjust the surface area of our air-brakes. A code flowchart was created and simulation were ran to test our airbrakes system. Electronics were then setup on a protoboard and the full design was modeled into Fusion 360.

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Fabrication

COTS body tubes were used for the rocket. For the air-brake system, 3D-printing was used for the winch design and jigs were made to create fiberglass flaps. Laser-cutting was then used for the fins, parachute, and the ripstop nylon surrounding the air-brakes. Paracord was attached to the tips of the air-brakes and the winch spool, which was controlled by a 360 degree servo motor.

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Reflection

A lot was learned about on-board electronics for flight vehicles through this project. We encountered many reliability issues where some flight would work flawlessly and others wouldn't deploy the air-brakes. If I were to do this project again, I would want to further simplify our air-brake design and try to reduce the extent of exposure the air-brake system had outside of the main body.