Do you have a simple drawing to post? Time to put our toes in the water, if it's
not to hot or cold we can dive in.

John Carmack wrote:

> For someone that just burned through a $4000 radiative chamber, I am a
> happy camper.
>
> We tested our fourth generation kerosene injector tonight.  There will be
> pictures in this weekend's update, but basically it has an even tighter
> venturi, down to 0.6" (with a 0.5" throat), and instead of the fuel coming
> in as a high velocity jet from the side of the venturi, a stainless pipe
> comes in from the outside on the catalyst pack side of the venturi, and it
> has a pretty sizable hole in the bottom, before a plugged end.  The idea is
> to have very low velocity fuel stream straight down the middle of the very
> high velocity (nearly sonic) peroxide decomposition, much like an SSME lox
> post injector in reverse.
>
> We put the radiative chamber together with the high temperature bolts, the
> stainless clamp ring, and the silica gasket material (not the gas-filled
> O-rings, which have yet to arrive). We also wet sanded the silicide coated
> flange, and used a torque wrench to evenly tighten the flange to 6 ft-lb on
> each of the #10 socket head cap screws.  All of the runs sealed absolutely
> perfectly.
>
> We started off very rich (but not as rich as we were running the regen
> engine), and immediately on lighting, it was obvious things were working a
> lot better, because the engine started glowing much more rapidly, and much
> higher up.  There was still a visible bias opposite the fuel inlet,
> probably because the flow had enough momentum that it was not "turned"
> completely axially when it came out of the drilled hole.
>
> Our oxidizer-only Isp was 246, up from a previous best of 192!  We shrank
> the fuel jet a good chunk, and the oxidizer-Isp increased a bit more.  We
> shrank it some more, and it finally nosed over a bit, which would still be
> at increasing "true Isp".
>
> We will have to get our sight glass hooked back up so we can measure the
> kerosene flow, but this was with an 0.040" kerosene jet, while a 0.060" jet
> resulted in a measured O:F of 2.2:1 on Saturday, so that would put us
> around 5:1 O:F, which would be a true Isp of 208!
>
> We will have to check the load cell calibration and more precisely measure
> the kerosene flow, but it was clearly a huge improvement.
>
> Thrust was 45 lbf +/- 5% at 250 psi feed pressure.
>
> We have great video of all these tests, including it throwing molten glass
> beads off of our cinder block blast deflector.  The entire chamber is
> glowing like a star, flaring so you can't see the outline in the video.
>
> We loaded up four liters of peroxide and let it run.  The burn was nice and
> monotonous, but after 45 seconds of hot fire, the plume started deflecting
> slightly, and some sparks started coming off the nozzle.  I killed the
> kerosene, and let the rest run out as monoprop.
>
> We burned the silicide coating off at the nozzle, which allowed the TZM to
> vaporize a hole.  The entire side opposite the fuel fitting has a different
> look to the coating, so I am going to send it back to Hitemco to have them
> tell us some things about it, and have the second chamber coated.  We are
> going to resolve the bias towards one side, possibly improve our film
> cooling, and stay a bit richer.
>
> We may be near the theoretical max Isp (220 at a leaner mixture), but we
> wanted to get rid of the uneven combustion, so we modified the fuel
> injector tube to actually take a 90 degree turn (cut, bend, weld), instead
> of having a hole drilled in the side.  This will give straighter, and even
> lower velocity fuel injection.  We won't be able to "see" the difference
> until we get the second chamber coated, but we are going to test it with
> the regen engine (at a much richer jetting) this weekend.  I have a good
> ring of film "cooling" steam holes in the injector, but I may make a ring
> on the bottom to turn them into a sheet instead of multiple jets.  We may
> have problems with regen cooling, because the greatly increased efficiency
> will have increased the chamber temperature and decreased the peroxide flow.
>
> We are laying out the work for a 1000lbf regen biprop now.
>
> John Carmack
>
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--
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
........ Alex Fraser  N3DER .........
......... [EMAIL PROTECTED] .......
[~]_>^</\-[~]_>^</\-[~]_>^</\-[~]_>^<


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