I Built a ROCKET PROPELLER

Have you ever seen this toy right here? It's a science toy. Put some water on it, you light up a flame to heat it up, the water turns to steam, comes out of these tiny tubes and makes it spin. This is actually a replica of a very old steam turbine designed in the 1st century AD that is called Aelopyle. I was just looking at this and this is basically a spinning rocket. Like if you put a rocket around a pivot to make something spin. What if that something was a propeller? This video was brought to you by Opera. It doesn't make sense, does it? Why would I use a rocket to rotate the propeller when I can just use the rocket directly? Well, I recently learned that it's better to move a lot of air slowly rather than moving fewer air very fast. I'm calling it air, but it's basically any exhaust gas, whatever the gas is. You see, the energy required to accelerate a gas increases with the square of its velocity. That's the reason why fans are big and move slowly. The point I'm driving home here is that, unless you're moving up at many times the speed of sound, you don't really need a rocket. Okay, first order of business, building a rocket. Luckily, I am what you call a rocket expert. Okay, I'm not an expert, but I have experience in the rocket building realm. A rocket is actually a very simple thing. You burn stuff, make the stuff go through a small hole very fast, third law of Newton, and things go whoosh. This is the part that is gonna burn stuff. I made it myself. The air comes through here, the butane gas comes through here, they meet, they mix, and they are ignited by a spark. The spark is generated in a module I built that uses one of those cheap high voltage transformers you can get at Amazon. This is graphite. The material pencils are made of. The dark part of the pencils, the one you use to write. The other one is wood. Graphite can take heat like it's nothing. It's also very easy to cut. I'm gonna use it to make a nozzle for my rocketo. To size the nozzle, I used this very ugly excel sheet that is filled with equations that I stole from the NASA website. But, because I don't really trust my own math, I machined three different sized nozzles. I'm gonna see which one performs best. That's what the ancient Greeks called empiricism. The excel nozzle won! Wahey! Here's the thing. I don't want the exhaust to go straight back. I want it to go sideways, to make things rotate. You remember? Like in the yellow pile? So technically this nozzle doesn't work. Luckily, I have this brass tube with an inner diameter of three millimeters. Yeah, basically the area of a four millimeter hole is equivalent to the area of two three millimeter holes. I know, math is weird. You see? Now I have this rocket arms rotating thing. I could go with more arms, like three or four. Not four, maybe. Uh, that's not a great design. But anyway, to go with more arms I would need smart tubes and these are the smallest ones I have. So, to it is. This is a zirconia ceramic ball bearing. And let me tell you, fire does not scare this little one. If I made a fidget spinner with it and threw it in hell, it would still spin. Wait, go back. You're burning? You're not supposed to burn. You were the chosen one. Apparently I assumed the entire ball bearing was made of ceramic, which is not. This part, the cage, is made out of plastic. Plastic doesn't do well in hell. I need to replace it with another material. This is graphite. The material pencils are made of. And besides taking heat better than Hell's Kitchen's contestants, it's also a very low friction material. So I made a cage out of graphite. Okay, my hands are disgusting. I should probably wear gloves when I'm handling graphite. You see? An all-natural homemade ceramic ball bearing. No need for plastics or WD-40. Now, you must be wondering, why am I only wearing one glove? Well, that's none of your business. Also, let's test this with fire. Yeah, this is insanely hot. Look at that. It's giving all a Leidenfrosten effect on me. Sponsor time. I spend a lot of time on the internet. I mean, I'm a YouTuber, it's a given, but I also use my browser to do research, 3D model, listen to music, and watch safety tutorials. I use Opera 1 R2, Opera's latest update, and it's just easy to use. I mean, they have this really handy music player that I can access from the sidebar, no extra tabs or apps needed to control my music, and I can even detach the music player and move it anywhere inside or outside of the browser. And that way I can use it without interrupting what I'm doing. They also have this cool split screen feature within the browser, which for me is just priceless, because when I'm designing a new 3D model, I always need to have a reference image visible all the time. Having to switch tabs is just annoying. With this new Opera feature, I don't have to open a new window. All I have to do is drag down the tab and kabam, split screen. You can even alter the entire theme of the browser, like adding animated backgrounds, user interface colors, and browser sounds, customizing it to your precise liking. Opera also has this cool built-in AI feature called Area that can answer any questions directly in the command line, and it recognizes images. All I have to do to summon it is press Ctrl Slash or Command Slash if you're using Mac. Why would you? This feature comes very handy when I'm trying to illustrate a concept on a video, or just have fun. The best part about all of this is that it's free. What do you have to lose? Just give it a go. Trust me on this. You can download it using the link in the description down below. By doing that, you're also helping this channel, and I appreciate it. And to that I have to say, Pamuru Chiriri Antichurkudigi. This being hot wouldn't be a problem if I had a metal propeller, which I don't. The only propeller I have is this one, which is made of carbon fiber. The carbon fiber actually is not a problem, because it can take temperature pretty well. The problem is the binder, which is resin. And as I know from experience, resin burns. A lot. Not to be worried though, because like I said before, I have experience. And for the first time, I actually have the perfect solution. This is the butane can I'm using as fuel to burn. It's filled with liquid butane, but as you might have noticed, there's no liquid coming into the rocket. That's because butane has an interesting property. When it's enclosed, it's like a carbonated soda. It's liquid and under pressure. But when you open its metaphorical cap, it decompresses and turns into a gas. Here's the interesting part. When it decompresses, it also gets super cold. All I have to do is somehow wrap this butane canister around the rocket to cool it. The idea is for the rocket to burn the butane. The rocket gets hot, but the butane, which is expanding, gets colder. The heat from combustion goes into the butane, which increases its pressure and pushes more butane out to be burnt. It's a double win, because the pressure of butane at room temperature is normally just 2 bar, which is very low. But now I can steam the butane and get mucho power. Thermodynamics is just beautiful. I have this copper pipe that it's easy to bend. I'm gonna wrap it in a spiral around the rocket and connect it to a WD-40 can I adapted to be my fuel reservoir. I guess I need a WD-40 after all. It has an adapter so I can recharge it using those butane cans used to charge lighters. It also has a pressure dial so I can control the pressure. I don't want this turning into a pipe bomb. I also machined this part in graphite to act as an interface between the propeller and the rocket, because even with cooling I'm pretty sure this is gonna get hot and I only have this one propeller. Now, let me tell you something. It was not easy getting this thing going, because if I place the can below the coil, the engine would run decently, but because all the butane went to the can and not the coil, there was no cooling and the engine got super hot. Even worse, without absorbing the heat from the engine, the butane pressure would drop pretty quickly and the engine would die. On the other hand, if I place the can above the coil, all the butane would be in the coil, it would absorb way too much heat, the pressure would rise like crazy and the liquid butane would get shot directly into the combustion chamber. The trick was for me to do some strategic placement of the can and charging the entire setup with just the right amount of butane to get it running decently. Now, if you're wondering if all of this is useless and most of the power is coming from the compressed air anyway, well, I did a test using just air at 2 bar of pressure and the engine didn't even move, but with the exact same pressure of air and the combustion of butane, the engine ramped up to 640 rotations per minute. Okay, that number is not super impressive, but this is a pretty big propeller and I was not using that much pressure anyway. It's not an excuse, it's just that... shut up. When I did use the max butane pressure I could reach, which was about 4 bar, the engine did much better. An astounding 1280 rotations per minute. Okay, that's also not that impressive, in fact it's very annoying. I have a max pressure of 8 bar available in my air compressor, but I can't use them because the butane is only reaching 4 bar. If I use more air pressure than butane pressure, the air pushes the butane back into the can and the engine dies. Or even worse, the can explodes. That's not good. I did some tests with my thermal camera and the temperature in the coil is low when compared with a nozzle rotating thingy, which means the butane is absorbing heat. So explain to me, why isn't the pressure raising? I ran a lot of tests trying to get this baby hotter. In fact, I ran so many tests that I ran out of butane. It's true, I'm not joking. And me being as lazy as I am, instead of going out to buy more butane, I decided to disassemble my welding kit and steal the butane can in there. Here's the funny thing, this is not butane. So, when I dumped this butane into my can reservoir, the butane pressure immediately spiked to 4 bar. That freaked me out, because that normally only happens when the engine is super hot. But the engine wasn't hot. And this was the moment I decided to read the label on the can. Wait, does this mean this just naturally has more pressure? Noice. Jesus! That is insane! My god! I think you can tell by my reaction that it was going very fast. It was going at 2840 rotations per minute. Looking at the information from the propeller, it should be generating about 1 kg of thrust, which is pretty nice. Now I need to find a way to use the rotation of the engine to compress the air I need for the combustion. I can't really fly this with my air compressor on its back. Until then, thank you for watching, and remember, tomatoes are disgusting.