This poor girl decided to make her nest in one of my gardens like 5 ft from my front door, every time I walk out I scare her away. Overall this probably isn’t the best location for her and her nest obviously. What do I do/ who do I call??
Some people underestimate the amount times you might fail in engineering.
While it’s a cliche lesson, my team and I have learned so much because so much went wrong this season, and honestly, I’m not disappointed one bit.
At the time of writing, our best guess as to why our rocket shredded was due to previous water damage (rocket landed in a drainage ditch) that had weakened the cardboard and stiffener tubes. Despite epoxying it back together, the rocket baked out in the sun in the 80+ degree Alabama heat. Those layers separated, and along with the choice to exclude a mass simulator for our payload, our rocket shredded as soon as it was no longer under boost.
With each launch something different went wrong, chute deployment damaging the airframe, tangled parachutes with a hard impact into the only ditch in 5 square miles, our retention system failing sending our payload plummeting 500ft to the ground, and ultimately this spectacular failure at the final competition.
With each failure it’s easy to look in hindsight and wonder why you couldn’t see what you’re doing was wrong. Why did we switch from fiberglass to reinforced cardboard, why did we build a 12ft+ rocket, why did we decide make our payload a rover? These questions come with the assumption that, you had could’ve had it figured out then, and that you were able to connect the dots. But the dots didn’t exist before hand, and this is engineering; decisions were made within reason, the work was done. Drop out rates for Engineering majors are so high because, people fail, get tired of failing, or they think that they shouldn’t ever fail.
Without that failure though, there’s no way to know what works and what doesn’t. Even if there is, somebody had to find out the first time. Engineering is full of physical problems in a very unideal world, removed from classrooms, plans, or timelines. In theory, theory works. But that isn’t the case in the real world.
What my team could’ve gained from a mediocre result would’ve been much less valuable that what we learned with all our successes, partial failures, and total failures. Failing is showing you obviously what you didn’t know, or what you didn’t do right this time, and without that it’s easy to repeat them.
Of course, the real world doesn’t always come with second chances, but that’s why we do these competitions/projects/hobbies, to learn. Many teams had difficult to no payload deployment, and troubles of their own in the race to compete. We faced the same. But there would be no winners or losers, if nobody failed at something. It’s a lesson many engineers forget or don’t fully grasp, and can drag you down if you’re not careful.
But my team didn’t allow it to drag them down. We won’t. Not now, or ever, because we learned, and im proud of all we did to make it to the end. It’s a utility. It’s a tool. It’s what makes good engineers, and pushes industries forward. No success is ever built without failures on the way.
TL;DR
If you want to learn, fail.
EDIT: LINK TO ANIMATIONS;
https://www.reddit.com/r/AerospaceEngineering/s/IFJqHCyVrp
https://www.reddit.com/r/AerospaceEngineering/s/8nEEzjiNhS
So in context of my uni team starting a new propulsion program, we created out own test stand to get things up and running. This required a coresponding safety report to show our designs and procedures were safe. My rocketry lead thought it was a good idea to require that we use a fiberglass blast shield (engineers rolling in their graves across the globe Ik ).
What you’re looking at is this fiberglass tube containing an aluminum Solid Rocket Motor case. So as dumb of an idea it was, I decided to model it in Autodyn and ngl the results are cool.
I applied a pressure curve to the inside surface of the motor to model a deflagration to detention (DDT) over-pressurization. Obv in the velocity image, not all of red dots are going 800m/s (they designate eroded elements that met strain failure) but they’ve got to be pretty close.
Safe to say bc of his dumb requirements and other bs, our safety report didn’t pass, and we have to wait till next semester to test (thank the lord he graduates). Safe to say we didn’t tho, bc if this did happen, we would be testing in an open field 100ft away from this ( I like my skin shrapnel free :)).
But I’ve learned a lot from this. I plan to step it up to a Fluid-Structure Interaction in LS-DYNA to better simulate how the expanding gasses push the aluminum/fiberglass. But yeah thought this subreddit would find this cool. Lmk and suggestions of what I should do next or differently.
P.S. One his requirements was that we lay welding blankets down at the exhaust to protect from flames and exhaust gasses (this would’ve been tested in a muddy farm field in April 😃😃🥲). Likewise the fiberglass was to protect from “flammable debris.” When buying 1/2” thick steel would’ve been cheaper.