The propulsion demonstration that was shown during one of the weeks for WoA was amazing. It is the first time I've seen a gas turbine engine up-close. The way how the turbine works is fascinating, is like how air that we breathe in everyday is being used to power up an engine. We had to wear ear mufflers as the sound that the engine produces is very loud as the turbine is rotating at extremely high speed.
At the start of the ignition, flames can be seen slightly for a moment after fuel is being injected into the air and being ignited. After that, the turbine just turns at very high speed, the air around the area is slightly distorted due to heat and also the air travelling into the engine at high speed. The rotation per minute of the engine went up to 70000 rpm after the engine started up for quite sometime. As this is the smaller engine that is used to power smaller aircraft, the engines that are used by commercial airplanes will be much more bigger and it will run faster and even louder.
The propulsion game that we played is also interesting, even though its a simple game of just making a ping pong ball float up, everyone came up with different ways of getting it to propel as high as possible. We thought of just covering the end of the balloon with a rolled up paper and then put the ping pong ball on top and release the air, but the ping pong ball did not really fly high. So we decided to make it into a cannon structure, like those cannon used in medieval days, where an explosion will propel the cannon ball forward. We placed the ping pong ball half way into the balloon's tip, then we apply pressure on the balloon to make the ping pong ball shoot out. But in the end, the balloon burst before the ping pong ball could even fly out. It is very interesting as it really makes you think about the wonders of air, how it can help change the world like flying and also how we can survive because of it..
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