At 03:21 PM 9/27/2002 -0400, you wrote: >On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, John Carmack wrote: > > Kerosene works great. The residue problem is only an issue when you are > > cooling with kerosene, which a peroxide biprop isn't. > >No, they're a more general problem than that. During testing, according >to the Rotary/XCOR folk, it's not uncommon to get propellant A into the >plumbing for propellant B by accident. XCOR uses isopropanol in its big >engines because of bad memories of repeatedly scrubbing kerosene residues >out of complex LOX plumbing. > > Henry Spencer > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
We use brass hardware for all the fuel plumbing so we never accidentally reuse a fuel fitting on the peroxide side (which is all stainless). There really isn't any way we could backflow kerosene into any peroxide plumbing, because it would have to get through the catalyst pack first. As we have already shown, any fuel in the cat pack is a worse issue than kerosene residue in lines... I would be interested in hearing someone from XCOR say what part of the lox plumbing exactly got kerosene residue in it. The only thing I can imagine is part of the injector manifold. Having a self-cleaning fuel system is certainly a benefit of some value, and could make the fuel decision for a lox system, but kerosene really doesn't seem to have any hardships for our designs. John Carmack _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
