Experimental Data Analysis Lab

Lab Goals

WATER ROCKET SIMULATIONS: Write a series of MATLAB scripts and/or functions that simulate the flight of a water rocket, including maximum height during flight, given a set of initial conditions. You will compare these simulations to data from actual rocket launches by previous PHYS 39X classes and try to reconcile simulated vs. actual data. Your group will prepare and present a short summary of your work at the Thursday, 1 May class meeting.

Lab Manifest

• Working version of MATLAB
• Lab Handout
• Water Rocket Simulations
  • student data from previous class (notebook format)

The 'water rocket' lab's goal is to develop simulations of water rocket flights, a program that calculates the height (and velocity, acceleration, rocket internal pressure, mass, etc. as a function of time during flight) for a given set of water rocket parameters (nozzle diameter, initial internal pressure, water volume, etc.) and initial values. The lab handout, linked above, gives detailed instructions for this goal. It also poses a series of questions for each lab which need to be answered in your lab notebook, along with any tables and figures requested.

Water Rocket Simulation lab:

General Instructions

There are really three separate main tasks here. There first is to peruse Finney (2000) to get an idea how to use physics and formulate the governing equations for your water rocket simulation. This should include the effects of air resistance. We don't seek to solve, analytically, those governing equations here. The second task is to 'discretize' these equations so they can be approximated for small time steps using Matlab. In this second step you will write a MATLAB function that takes various initial conditions as inputs (such as air pressure, nozzle volume, etc), does the simulation, and passes back (preferably all the) variables such as rocket position, velocity, thrust, pressure, etc calculated as discrete functions of time. Ideally you will use MATLAB to generate graphs for different scenarios (say rocket thrust over time for a variety of initial air pressures). The third step entails reconciling your simulation results with rocket launch data from previous classes.

Code Assignment

In addition to the instructions posed in the lab handout, please email me a script that calls your water rocket function, and that function itself.

Errata

You're welcome to work with a partner for this lab. Each student needs to turn in their own notebook, but you can jointly submit code as a group (make sure that the zip file is labelled to indicate all group members). For future labs, collecting data with a partner will be encouraged, but most of the data analysis will again be done individually. Also for future labs I will expect everyone to submit their own code.