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Black Powder Igniter
Date:April 7, 2001
Weather: Mostly cloudy, windy, occasional rain drops
Author: Benjamin
Type: Igniter and Motor test flight
Acquired altitude: approx. 2473 ft. at burnout

A simple test of one of my new black powder pyrotechnic igniters on a paper casing motor proved very successful. This new igniter seems to have been capable of igniting the entire length of the core at once without any form of primer (what an ideal igniter should do). The design of this motor was very similar to those that got four to five hundred feet in altitude. The performance of this igniter, though, allowed the rocket to do much better in comparison to the same motor design set up on 120 V AC igniters. The altitude of the rocket at apogee is unknown, but at burnout, it was approximately 2473 feet AGL. It was late afternoon, so it was dark enough to see flame and sparks easily, but light enough to see clearly. When the small rocket reached burnout, it was immediately lost because the trail of smoke, flame, and sparks were all which could be tracked. The altitude was easily calculated using simple trigonometry as a function of the tangent of the angle made between the observer and the rocket and the horizontal distance between the rocket and the observer. It is easy to see that as tracking of the rocket was lost, we had to go with only the angle of the rocket at burnout, which is the reason for the unknown altitude at apogee. We hope to use the acceleration of the rocket, its gravitational acceleration (9.8 meters/sec. squ.), and time of flight to calculate altitude in the future. A video of the launch pad during launch showed a burning for about 3 seconds on the pad after liftoff. It is suspected that this was the igniter wires with remains of burning black powder. It is known that the wires themselves weren't burning, for they are made of steel from steel cable, which would couldn't have gained enough kinetic energy to ignite in air. The igniter consisted of a piece of steel wool, covered by a mixture of black powder and isopropyl alcohol. The rocket was a kno3 sucrose core-burning rocket, with the distance between the top of the core and the inside of the end plug equal to the distance from the core to the inside of the casing wall. This design gives the optimal surface area for a cylindrical core propellant grain. More static tests and flight tests will be conducted on this same motor and igniter.

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