[AR] Re: some interesting developments
- From: Nels Anderson <nels.anderson@xxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 16:26:18 +0000
On 01/04/2016 06:00 AM, David Weinshenker wrote:
I'm also wondering, at this point, why acetylene rather than some
more saturated light hydrocarbon (methane? ethane?) - the problem
of using the mixture non-explosively might be no worse, and the
higher hydrogen content would help Isp. (I'm not sure how that
trades against the molecular strain energy of the acetylene...)
Or are the Clever Tricks to prevent explosion of the mixture
actually acetylene-specific?
I don't know, but our discussion in recent months of lox-methane
monoprop did not suggest it was suitable (recall the very small upper
limit on the critical diameter found by O'Hara et al). Meanwhile, the
Russians were getting excited about acetylene-ammonia (as a fuel, not a
monoprop) back in 2010:
http://sputniknews.com/russia/20120505/173241862.html
http://www.linknovate.com/publication/acetam-new-high-effective-fuel-1014964/
http://www.freepatent.ru/images/patents/16/2442904/patent-2442904.pdf
(2nd page in English)
Maybe the general theme here is that nitrogen-bearing compounds
stabilize acetylene. On the other hand, the first link contains the
following sentence:
"Once the optimal ratio of acetylene and ammonia is found (in which fuel
will be sufficiently powerful without exploding too easily) the
designers will specify the parameters of the engine."
This rather suggests that the stability of acetylene-ammonia has yet to
be firmly established! Actually, it sounds just like ALASA.
Other related posts:
