Super Capacitor Rocket

oh if you've ever taken a look inside an electronic product before or have some general knowledge of electronics you've probably seen or heard of a capacitor a capacitor stores electrical energy similar to a battery but in a very different way a battery stores energy within a chemical which can then be converted into electrical energy to power whatever you want whereas a capacitor actually stores the electrical energy in the form of static electricity what this means is that it can be charged and discharged much faster than a battery can but there are some disadvantages so here I have a motor and the propeller strapped to a piece of wood so hopefully doesn't fly away and I have a battery cell and a capacitor now what I can do is I can wire up this battery to power the electric motor and I should also be able to use the capacitor to output its electrical energy to power the motor oh that's a that's a capacitor fully discharged so from that quick test you can tell that a capacitor has far less energy density than a battery and this is where super capacitors come in a super capacitor works in a similar way to a regular capacitor but it's a bit more advanced and can store far more energy not quite as much as a battery but it can be charged and discharged pretty quickly so how about we wire this up to the motor [Music] okay it's a bit of a dodgy connection just holding the wires like this but that should give you a pretty good idea that super capacitors have far more energy density than regular capacitors in fact the super capacitor has enough energy to power a small plane like this which can be charged up in a matter of seconds and powers is playing for quite a bit of time now this plane is pretty cool but I'd still don't think he's using the full potential of a super capacitor so I think it's time to step it up a notch or maybe a bit more I'm going to do six of these super capacitors to power a 500 watt brushless motor using a large propeller to see how high I can launch an electric rocket let's go right so before I shorten the wise and make everything a bit neater I just want to give it a quick run just to check whether first of all nothing is wired up wrong and also that these super capacitors can power the motor so that's just telling this be control what to do and I should be able to short these into a battery I highly do not recommend this but I haven't put a connector on this just yet so shove this in here in three two one maybe it needs to charge up for longer oh I haven't got anything plugged into the battery right now should we increase the throttle and see if it will spin it's working there's nothing charging up the capacitors so that motor is running 100 percent off of these super capacitors oh that's so cool look battery fully disconnected it's a very small battery here to power the servo tester but it's not applying any power to the system so what will also be interesting is when the motor cuts out what's the lowest voltage the speed controller here is rated for a minimum of a two cell lithium polymer battery which will be about seven point four volts so be interesting to see whether it shuts off turn the speed up a little bit I guess we'll just wait for the super capacitors to run out the motor obviously won't last this long when it has a propeller on it because it has a lot more resistance and a lot more current will be drawn so although it's running for a long time now it's it's not under any load so that's kind of expected okay that seems like it is dead so the super capacitors obviously at a low enough voltage for the speed controller to cut out and let's check the voltage six point four volts so yeah the motor cuts out at six point four volts which is probably not enough power to really lift much anyway so that's not a problem now I know the power system is working what I'm going to do is neaten up the wiring and the soldering and connect everything together and then we can get on with the parachute deployment mechanism whilst I'm getting on with the rest of the build I want to thank this video sponsor Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in arduino electronics CAD design and more so that you can learn to build project such as this a premium membership gives you unlimited access to thousands of high quality classes all created by experts in their fields so you can learn new skills to open new opportunities instead of browsing the internet for hours looking for a specific tutorial Skillshare has loads of tutorials all on one site it's also more affordable than most other learning platforms with an annual subscription working out at just under ten dollars per month by clicking the skill share link down in the description below the first 500 people that sign up will get a two month free trial and you can also help support my channel so thanks to school chef for sponsoring this episode and go check out Skillshare if you want to learn more okay so here we have it the finished super capacitor rocket at the top here I have the motor and propeller which is the thrust unit the reason for it being at the top is not for stability reasons it doesn't matter at what point on a rocket you have the thrust unit if you research the pendulum rocket fallacy the reason why is at the top and at the bottom is because with the propeller being at the bottom there's clearance issues with the ground I would need to build big fins to go around the side of the propeller and also if I need to add any kind of guide rail system at the side of the rocket the propeller must be well clear of that guide system so basically have a no-go zone disk as the propeller rises up from the ground so having at the top just gets rid of any clearance issues the motor is powered or controlled via this electronic speed controller it's 30 amps and it well this is currently set up for about 18 volts but it can run up to 25 volts I believe and then obviously we have the whole super capacitor unit there's six super capacitors in total the reason for this is that super capacitors are usually quite low voltage these are rated for 3 volts each so six of them in series is 18 volts these all what I've see widen to the speaking droll and dirty to the motor having the all the mass at the top is what you want for a stable rocket and also having these super capacitors so close to the motor means I should be able to deliver the power a lot better without having some thick gauge wires going down to the bottom now you can probably see this yellow thing in here this is actually the connector where I charged up the rocket it's the same as what I have on a lot of my batteries and I just give you a demonstration of how I charge this up so if I turn on my radio control I should be able to plug it in and wait for a couple seconds and that's probably charged and then I can just control the throttle so that's what's cool about having these super capacitors is I can fully charge the rocket in a matter of seconds so we can do loads of launches using just one battery now moving down the rocket is the parachute deployment system it's almost like an upside down rocket because normally Rockets have the parachute at the top and the thrust at the bottom where this is a thrust at the top and the parachute at the bottom now I've built into the fin system and the way it deploys is the this whole fin section is split into two halves and there's a rubber band holds it holds these two halves together and that clamps it to the tube so if I flick this switch it should move a small servo which is inside of here and that should deploy the parachute now some of you that will pay an extra extra attention whilst I was building the rocket may have noticed that this fin design is slightly different to the fin design during the build part of this video and that's because this is actually the version 2 capacitor rocket so what we're going to do is rewind a few days to show you what happened to the version 1 rocket right so I haven't made a proper launchpad for it yet but the weather's so nice right now that I decided to I just give it a quick test let's just give it a bit of height Orlick see if it works and check the parachute deployment in three two one okay that was interesting okay test number two in three two one we might have a bit of an issue Oh so now that I've spent a few days rebuilding the rocket I've made a few changes to the top half to make it a lot stronger and I've also modified the clamping point here where the fins clamp to the fuselage so hopefully there will be a lot more rigid in flight and be able to stabilize the rocket enough to not explode they also don't twist anymore so yeah how about we go take it for a test flight to see if this thing will actually fly let's go right so here we go I've got a small plank of wood as the launch pad I've got the rocket the battery to charge it and the remote what I'm going to do it's getting thrown up in the air and send this baby into the sky the wind is very calm right now it's a bit misty and cloudy but oh that's just the motor has an alarm so after 10 minutes if I lose the rocket it beeps just need to throttle it a little bit to stop that all right let's get the drone in the air okay so the drôme is in place what I need to do is charge up the rocket using the battery pack that should be charged up enough right so I'm gonna try and film this whilst controlling it because I think that might be the best way to do it and we spool up the motor slowly and then go full throttle and see this thing will work in three two one [Music] yes alright then parachute deployment oh that is so good yes I'm so happy three two one yes alright then parachute deployment oh that is so good yeah actually works a lot better than I expected well at least from those first few test flights the propeller looks a bit bent but I can just straighten out or replace the propeller I hope the wet grass hasn't ruined anything set up for another test launch row so I've set up for another test launch I haven't charged up yet because I need to get the drone in the air but from that first test launch obviously went really well I actually shut the throttle off early because I thought it was flying over towards those trees but it only landed like 20 meters away so I'm good to hold the throttle open for a lot longer this time see if we can get some more altitude in three two one oh yes Oh focus this seems pretty reliable now so I still shut the throttle off a bit early on that flight it's very hard to tell how far the rocket goes right now because I'm trying to look through a viewfinder of this camera whilst filming it Oh what's flying it I thought it was gonna go near these power lines but it's still caught away off from any object Lisi parachutes successfully deploys and everything seems intact in three two one oh no they deployed the plane flew oh okay I was so close it's very easy to rush the parachute packing whilst I'm out here in the field and but I think I'm gonna take a bit more care next time because that was a very close call don't know what's doing that maybe the speaking troll has some water in it seems to be working okay now so I'm just going to keep launching this this is good fun in three two one yeah boy in 3 2 1 right the parity didn't come out on that one I think I probably just stated the most obvious thing right let's go see what happened to the rocket hopefully it's not broken because I'll need to do some repairs my feet my shoes and my socks are soaking wet so I think it's time to head in anyway right yeah it seems to have exploded these fins which is annoying because I've ran out of blue filament right and then we've got a few good successful launches out that way so let's head in and sum up this project after I clicked all the parts so there we have it the super capacitor powered rocket I'm really pleased with the way it flew in the end especially after those first few version test flights more like explosions the parachute deployment worked most of the time part obviously the last time I'm not sure how high the rocket went but one of the flights I parked the drone it's about 80 meters high and this was just below it maybe 60 meters high so just under 200 feet I reckon I've learned a whole lot about super capacitors whilst doing this project I knew what an electrolytic electrolytic capacitor was from everyday electronic components but I had no idea the capabilities of super capacitors I've heard about them but I always thought they were a thing of the future that you hear with fast charging electric cars SoDo actually be able to use them in something like this was was really good actually it was really good fun to learn about I'd like to thank you very much for watching and if you enjoyed this video please leave a thumbs up if you're new to my channel please click subscribe down below and a huge huge thanks to all of our patrons for being supportive throughout this time of building these projects it's been quite a things been about three weeks since my last project mainly due to explosions on this and learning about this well these capacitors so thanks very much to all my patrons for making these videos possible and I will see in the next video goodbye oh it's cold

Channel: Tom Stanton

Views: 3,539,559

Keywords: supercapacitor, electric, vehicle, battery, capacitors, power, fast charging, rocket, model rocket, radio control, parachute, propeller, DIY, engineer, engineering, aircraft, physics, science, electronics, 3D print, printed, printer, supercapacitor battery, homemade, aerodynamics, aerodynamic, launch

Id: vWgwYBDSHGo

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/rjiii_3]

hmm... if it can shoot the three then im down

[u/RedRaiss]

Technically the right place to post this

[u/extensi0n]

def belongs here. thanks for sharing!

[u/potentialwatermelon]

Great job on the super capacitor rocket!!!!

Would look a lot better if it had a beard attached to it though 😉