As demonstrated in the video by the guy dumping LOX onto oil with
nothing but a faceshield, nothing will happen. There has to be some
activation energy put in to get it to go off.
An oily valve is more dangerous than oily lines.
On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 8:11 PM, Robert Watzlavick <rocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have no problem loading LOX in person, as long as I personally cleaned the
tanks and equipment. What do you think would actually happen if you loaded
LOX into a tank or lines that had some oil in them? Would there be any
warning (giant woosh out the vent), catch the metal on fire, or explode?
-Bob
On 01/04/2016 06:54 PM, Ben Brockert wrote:
And yet they also have a hypergols lab next door, where they were
working hands-on with both 'green' hypergols and classic nasty ones.
On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Andrew Burns <burns.andrew@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
When you're dealing with students you have to be extra-careful it seems,
most universities that I've been to/dealt with are insanely risk-averse,
especially when someone says the word 'rocket'.
Andrew
On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 1:46 PM, Ben Brockert <wikkit@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Replying to a thread from 8 years ago like a normal person]
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:58 PM, Jonathan Goff <jongoff@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
It should still be possible to liquefy natural gas using liquid
nitrogen, though it'd take quite a while at the usual commercial
feed
pressure.
At least according to some of the guys at XCOR, they did just that,
and it ended up being a royal pain in the backside. IIRC, it was very
easy to accidentally freeze the methane instead of just liquifying it.
I visited the propulsion lab at Purdue last year and they had run a
LOX/CH4 propulsion test program off methane they liquefied from a
natural gas line. Their very clever trick was that they had a dual
walled, insulated liquefaction vessel. Inside was gas turning to
liquid, cooled by liquid nitrogen. The clever part of the trick was
that they kept the liquid nitrogen pressure far enough above
atmospheric via a relief valve that its boiling temperature was above
the freezing point of methane. So the natural gas would liquefy, not
turn into a methane plug in a heat exchanger as Randall complained
elsewhere in this thread.
Their other clever trick is that they have a bunch of students who can
be assigned to do boring shit like monitoring the methane condenser,
which is similar to paint drying in reverse.
(Also relevant to the personal perspective of safety of propellant
handling discussion from today, a professor there thought that it was
needlessly reckless that Armadillo didn't do all of their propellant
transfers remotely. I don't actually know of any small newspace
companies that do nontoxic propellant transfer as a fully remote
activity. LOX is really not that scary.)
Ben
