Good Evening!

First of all we are happy to welcome our new team member Emil Vincent who joined SOLAR this week. He will from now on work in the electronics group.

Today we recieved our result from the PDR. As we expected the technical parts in our SED have to be improved. Regarding the mechanics we shall do much more simulations so we can prove that the experiment can withstand the vibrations and heavy forces that it will be exposed to during the flight but also the heat that the components and soldering elements will generate. There were also some issues regarding the argon gas chamber, but we have actually decided to remove that part from the experiment and fully focus on the two other chambers and work them out as good as possible. Regarding electronics and software we have to be more specific and do more tests on the soldering process.

Although we have alot to do we feel exited to continue working with all the new feedback. So after our exam on Monday we are good to go!

Have a really nice weekend (cause we won't)!

Hola!

First of all, sorry for poor activity on the blog! We have had some tough weeks with exams mixed with alot of work with SOLAR.

Tha main thing that we have decided is to skip the mechanisms that we had in our preliminary design. The mechanisms was a nice idea and would have been great if it would work during the flight. But after discussions with some experts we were told that it would be very hard to use that much and accurate mechanisms.

So now we are kinda close to our first design where we will use nicrome-wire to melt the samples.Now we are doing simulations on the new design (stay tuned for pictures) and several tests with the nicromewire and the solder.

We wish you all a pleasant saturday night!

Yesterday some members in the team went to the Luossa-slope in Kiruna for some skiing in the nice weather. Fortunately no legs were broken which means that we can continue our work with full capacity :). In the picture you can see Hamoon, ready to rock!

Hey!

Since the training week at Esrange which ended last friday, we have been working hard to get a detailed structure of the work that awaits. Every subgroup are doing a work breakdown structure and a gantt chart. Hopefully this will increase the effectivity of the work.

Regarding the mechanical design the experts at Esrange were not fond of our releasemechanism using two springs. Due to that we will come up with a new design the upcoming week where a piston motor will be used instead. We will also make some other improvments on the design and make it more detailed. As soon as that is done a new CAD-model wil be made.

When the new design is made we will continue with simulations; Thermal, Model and Finite element analyses.

Next week we will also buy some components so we can make some tests with real stuff and confirm our electrical simulations. The microcontroller will also be bought so the programmers can start their tests too.

Last Monday five team members travelled to Luleå where they held a presentation about our project and the REXUS/BEXUS programme in general for students in lower grades.

Best regards!

PDR

Hi!

Earlier today we had our Preliminary Design Review with the experts. We presented our current status in the project for about 20 minutes and discussed it with the experts afterwards. The presentation went well, but the were som issues regarding the design that considered them. The main issues are our high power consuption needed for the heating elements, the structural strength and how we will keep one of the chambers pressurized during the flight. We also have to perform several tests and simulations to prove that the experiment will work practically without heatspread and overpressure due to the pressurized chambers and the argon cartridge.

Now we look forward to more interesting information at the traning week and next week when the team is gathered again the hard work continues!