JimHeaney
New Member
Hey everyone, I am putting together a knowledge wiki for new members of our college rocketry team and I am wondering how everyone calculates the parachute snatch/opening force for HPRs.
Looking over old documentation of our past rockets, it looks like students arrived at a number with no info of how they got to it, or they used a factor of safety of 4-6 times the normal drag force of the parachute, which seems like a bit much (but then again, no such thing as too safe!). I'd imagine this is a good enough approach for an L1 or L2, but I foresee the team starting to build bigger rockets in the future and I want to make sure to give them a good base of knowledge to build upon.
I did some digging and found some old documentation from NASA and some research groups, but they all tend to either gloss over it without quantifying the forces, or do such a deep dive into math that I feel like I am back in my Differential Equations Class! One calculator that I did come across was the Parker College OSCALC, has anyone used this in the past?
Looking over old documentation of our past rockets, it looks like students arrived at a number with no info of how they got to it, or they used a factor of safety of 4-6 times the normal drag force of the parachute, which seems like a bit much (but then again, no such thing as too safe!). I'd imagine this is a good enough approach for an L1 or L2, but I foresee the team starting to build bigger rockets in the future and I want to make sure to give them a good base of knowledge to build upon.
I did some digging and found some old documentation from NASA and some research groups, but they all tend to either gloss over it without quantifying the forces, or do such a deep dive into math that I feel like I am back in my Differential Equations Class! One calculator that I did come across was the Parker College OSCALC, has anyone used this in the past?