Student Projects
Contact Information
University: IUT Orsay, Université Paris Sud, France
Team Members: Valentin B, Charline B, François Xavier C, Clément D, Tristan D, Mathieu D, Gilles D, Etienne K, Matthieu R, Antonin T, Valentin V, Gaëtan A (2nd year)
Faculty Advisers: Bastien Vincke, Sergio Rodriguez
Email Address: bastien.vincke@u-psud.fr
Submission Language: English
Project Information
Title: Orseus Project: False Start!
Description: This project is intended to assess the performance of new sensory and instrumentation technology under conditions of very low pressure and temperature. To this end, we have worked on the design of a high-altitude balloon containing six physics experiments monitored by a data acquisition system..
Products: NI myRIO, National Instrument LabVIEW 2013
The Challenge: Our challenge is to design and developpe an embedded system able to carry out experiments under very low pressure and temperature conditions.
The Solution: A team of students of the University Institute of Technology of Orsay (France) decided this year to take over the project Orseus. This project aims to design a high altitude balloon containing experiments and to achieve a release in order to collect the measurements and analyse them.
Since the beginning of 2015, our team, in collaboration with the “Planète Sciences” association and “CNES”, have identified and selected several interesting physics experiments to be integrated inside the balloon payload. Among those experiments, we highlight the implementation of some of them because of its originality. For instance, the design of a voltage generator based on thermoelectric effect, the study of solar radiation and the measurement of pollution. More conventional experiences were also included such as the study of the dynamics of the payload regarding its the altitude or the experimental validation of theoretical laws relating temperature and pressure.
Expected results
Thought this project, the students got a great expectation on the results and conclusions they will inferred from the different measurements acquired in the stratosphere. They really wish to contribute with their work on solutions to challenging problems of our society related to the improvement of energy storage, the pollution reduction and the discovery of new solar panel technology.
For several months, they have designed, tested, implemented, measured, calibrated and finally validated their experiments. Taking advantage of a previous year high altitude balloon project experience, they have decided to radically improve the electronic architecture of the payload. To this end, they replaced the Mbed microcontroller with a National Instruments myRIO unit. This change made considerably easier the programming of the data acquisition system since the students were able to to applied leaned programming concepts acquired during their courses. Moreover, the myROI allowed them to use a single robust system to carry out data acquisition. Finally, programming is relatively “easy” with Labview, so students were able to focus on other issues related to the measurement.
The result of all their efforts is a beautiful “baby” of 2.3 kg weight (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Internal and External View of the payload
A brief journal of this adventure
First, the student team have registered their payload with “Planète Sciences” during the day “Meeting of Club Space” at the Science City and their balloon release was scheduled for Saturday, April 11th at Argeville, Audeville, France.
This Saturday, April 11, the team was composed of :
- 12 students (Valentin B, Charline B, François-Xavier C, Clément D, Tristan D, Mathieu D, Gilles D, Etienne K, Matthieu R, Antonin T, Valentin V, Gaëtan A)
- 1 supervisor from Planète Sciences (Elodie Francilette)
- 2 supervisors from IUT Orsay (Roger Reynaud, Bastien Vincke)
At their arrival at Argeville, the team started to get ready everything for the balloon release. It was necessary to check the entire flight chain and prepare the place for inflation. In parallel, some of the students started the acquisition system of the payload and check that the remote monitoring was working properly: everything works as expected!
Despite the winds, we decided to inflate our balloon. To better secure our inflation, the balloon was inflated between two covers. Indeed, the balloon was extremely fragile and it would probably burst at any time.
Every body is ready?! Launch!
A false start
And Disaster!! The balloon has burst: False start! After watching the video replay, we note that the balloon actually hit the ground. The balloon is quite fragile and it instantly burst.
The students were very disappointed with this launch, arms drooping ... Thier project being reduced to thousands of pieces in less than a second ...
Fortunately, Elodie had foreseen everything! She had brought extra balloon and provided two additional bottles of helium! Problem solved.
So we start again and inflating the balloon :
Live data monitoring
Then, we rushed to the telemetry receiver and everything worked as expected. The monitoring station started receiving data, our balloon was heading to the East! Unfortunately, the signal strength decreased and we finally lost contact with our payload some minutes later.
Payload hunting
Our team then decided to go to the predicted landing place: “Malay le Grand”, east direction. After 1-hour drive, we reached our destination and we scanned the frequency of our payload hoping to get contact again ... Sadly, we have get no sign of life! After long minutes, the payload sent us two SMS indicating its current GPS position. It was apparently going down! It was finally located in “Boeurs en Othe”, only 20km away from us.
We headed towards Boeurs en Othe with a great expectation to retrieve our payload. Unfortunately, once we arrived to the last indicated coordinates, we realized that there is no GSM coverage so as to allow our balloon to contact us again. With no other options, we have decided to scan the monitoring frequency, but we got no response. After about 2 hours of searching, we must face the facts: our payload is lost. Our team came back to Orsay, full of memories and with the hope that someone could find our payload and contact us ...
An unexpected ending
One week later … we received a phone call from a farmer in “Boeurs en Othe” ... who found our payload !!!!!!
A new trip to “Boeurs en Othe” has been scheduled to find our payload. We met the farmer who found our payload. We decided to open the structure together to see all experiments made by our students. And, it is the drama! A picture is worth a thousand words:
Figure 2: Inside the payload
Did we firmly attached all the electronic cards??? Seeing this "mess", we started to doubt if we had any recorded data ... Did everything remain in place during the flight ?
Finally, all data were readable. We were able to extract the log file containing all the data. (the log file is attached :
CollectedData.xlsx)
Post Processing
Pictures!!! that is something that everyone wanted to see. Good news never comes alone; the camera's memory card was also readable!! we made a small selection of pictures :
Figure 3: Onboard photos
All other photos are here : http://urlz.fr/1RGa .There are great pictures!! In particular, there are two of them where we see the drag of an airplane, absolutely amazing :-).
It is worth to mention that our NI myRIO unit recorded data until 3am Sunday morning!(it means 13 hours of continuous operation). We were afraid about the autonomy, but finally we were wrong.
After post processing the acquired data, our payload have traveled more than 115km: (our GPS stop working after 40 thousand feet altitude).
Figure 4: Predicted (red) and real (yellow) path
This experience was very rewarding for our students. They were able to use their knowledge and achieve with success a major project.
You will find all photos and videos of the project at this link: http://urlz.fr/1RGd
All software (embedded and monitoring software) are attached.
