Barometric Flight Simulator
The vacuum chamber PELICAN is built for testing the rocket on the ground. It was built as a bachelor thesis by Georg Kurzmann, supervised by Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.rer.nat. Schennach Robert and sponsored by Pfeiffer Vacuum.
The main tube of the chamber is easily exchangeable to accommodate only the flight computer or the entire rocket. This allows efficient testing.
The pump is connected to valves that allow the pressure inside the chamber to be controlled and adjusted according to the ambient pressure required for each second of the flight. This allows us to simulate a flight of the fully assembled rocket and to make sure everything works as intended.
Our early rockets, AVES, AVES II, and HALCYON, primarily used barometers to determine apogee. Due to advances in our sensor processing, as well as the problems associated with supersonic flight, our newer systems dedect apogee using a variety of sensors, and therefore it is not as easy to simulate the flight in PELICAN. For this advanced testing it is supplemented with KIWI.
