Water Rocket Performance Modeler
(ver 2001 Paul Grosse)
Abandoned Freeware


With this Water Rocket performance modeling tool, you will be able to 
predict the duration and height of the flight of any water rocket that 
you make (within reason of course). 

Typically, you would take some measurements of the pop bottles that you 
are going to use - diameter, weight and so on - and type these figures 
in. Run the model and see if you can come up with improvements - using 
the 3D plots, the model can help you out with many of these such as 
best weight and mass of water for the pressure you are going to use and 
the optimisation process (equivalent to hundreds of launches) can take 
only a few minutes. If you are doing this as part of a science 
olympiad, many specifications will already be there such as pressure 
and maximum weight.

The model is not the last word with your water rocket, it gives you a 
good starting point, will save you a lot of time and will give you an 
idea of what will happen if you change something. There are many 
variables that either are not practical for most people to measure or 
cannot be foreseen so, although the model may suggest that you try 436g 
of water, you will probably end up using 425 or 450 and it will not 
make much difference as there was a bit of wind turbulence or the 
parachute deployed late, you could only read the pressure gauge to the 
nearest 5 psi and you never really trusted the calibration anyway, and 
so on.

The program runs on MS DOS and so is fairly quick (being completely 
self contained with none of those nasty Dynamic Linked Libraries (DLLs) 
to clutter the place up and make a general mess). It will run under 
Windows 95, 98 and so on. You can also use the palette editor to change 
the palettes that the computer model uses when plotting the 3D 
Optimisations. This allows the user to make palettes that can 
illustrate contours, defining useful regions of optimisation, different 
colour schemes or even save on printer ink.