CP

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Joined
Dec 20, 2015
Messages
22
Reaction score
3
Anybody, anywhere have a simple, perhaps new, method to determine the Center of Pressure. My rockets are sorta large and the string thing won't work. . .and neither will the card board cut out idea.
 
Open Rocket if it is not a tube finned or otherwise oddly configured design.
 
What do you do if you have a rocket that is asymetric in cross section? For example, a rocket that is oval (or eliptical) in cross section?
 
TANSTAAFL. Your choices are easy but so inaccurate as to be useless (cardboard cutout), harder but reasonably accurate (Barrowman Equations, either by hand or through a program like RockSim or OpenRocket -- and really, they are not hard to use), or bite the bullet, learn to do CFD, and get very accurate. Easy and accurate does not exist.
 
@Sooner Boomer you can do cardboard cut out of multiple profiles. ie 0 and 90 degrees, more if you have lots of asymmetric parts Taking the worst case should be sufficiently conservative.
Cardboard cut out is just finding the centroid of the shape. For large birds you can do this mathematically.
 
@Sooner Boomer you can do cardboard cut out of multiple profiles. ie 0 and 90 degrees, more if you have lots of asymmetric parts Taking the worst case should be sufficiently conservative.
Cardboard cut out is just finding the centroid of the shape. For large birds you can do this mathematically.
The biggest problem with cardboard cutout is it vastly overestimates the effect of the body tube and so for most rockets is 'way too conservative (in the sense that it estimates the CP as being much too far forward).
 
The biggest problem with cardboard cutout is it vastly overestimates the effect of the body tube and so for most rockets is 'way too conservative (in the sense that it estimates the CP as being much too far forward).
Not saying it's a perfect method by any means. But learning and affording cfd software isn't for everyone. There are things that Barrowman equ's can't handle, and RockSim and OR definitely have their limits. If I was RSO at a launch and someone came in with CFD plots for a highly unique design I'd have hard questions before I let it on the pad about how the work was verified. I've seen way to much GIGO on analysis models to take the word of a pretty plot. The important point I think we're both trying to make is to think about the assumptions the analysis is based on.
 
Last edited:
Not saying it's a perfect method by any means. But learning and affording cfd software isn't for everyone. There are things that Barrowman equ's can't handle, and RockSim and OR definitely have their limits. If I was RSO at a launch and someone came in with CFD plots for a highly unique design I'd have hard questions before I let it on the pad about how the work was verified. I've seen way to much GIGO on analysis models to take the word of a pretty plot. The important point I think we're both trying to make is to think about the assumptions the analysis is based on.

Ditto......totally agree.
For the odd roc’s I have designed, sims are very limited or useless. I have surprised a few RSOs in my time with how some of them fly....they are sometimes too conservative also until you show them. There is nothing bad about a “heads up” launch. :)
 
If the problems you're having are just because your rocket is too large, remember that CP location doesn't generally vary much with size. You can test a smaller mockup of the same geometry and get a useful answer.
 
Back in the day, circa 1995, a Tripoli rocketeer, named Bruce Lee, developed a simplified method to manually calculate Center of Pressure.

His 10-year old son was able to do the computations with ease.

Dave F.

View attachment 461102


View attachment 461103


View attachment 461104


View attachment 461105


View attachment 461106


View attachment 461107
That is nice, but a downloadable PDF would be better. I'm not sure I like the fill in the blanks spreadsheet approach. Back in the early 80's I published a blank CP worksheet in my newsletter. In any event, I remember being frustrated, staring at those equations from the Handbook, while in Junior high. My math teachers were unwilling to help me and were only interested in advancing their own agenda. I just needed a little intro to algebra.
 
Back
Top