This Crazy Project

During my Junior year of high school, I has a unique opportunity to do a science fair project to present at an event in Beijing. I ended up building a mono-propellant hydrogen peroxide rocket engine. It put out a thrust of about 500 newtons. Now, I'm in college, and I've decided to build another rocket engine, except that this one will produce about 22,000 newtons. At this point, all of this is really just an idea, and while I am continuing to work on it, I think completion is still years away.

Here's the plan:

An 85 Liter tank of water is heated to a temperature of 250° C (480° F). At the desired moment, the water is released through a piston valve to a Convergent-Divergent nozzle, generating steam moving at more than 1000 m/s. The reactive force pushes the tank and the Porsche 924 to which it is attached at huge acceleration.

That's the plan anyway. As I do this research the estimated costs for the project just gets higher and higher, so much so that I really don't even feel like talking about that part of it.

I've created this blog in an effort to document the design process, and hopefully a forum for people to speak up and correct me on anything that might have otherwise led to 3rd degree burns.