On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Jake Anderson wrote:
> so if you placed say a piece of carbon with "the right shape" TM
> in the combustion chamber such that the peroxide was sprayed onto it
> and a portion of it was in the hot exhaust section. the heat from the
> exhaust would soak through the carbon and decompose the peroxide...
As others have noted, carbon's not a good choice in a highly oxidizing
environment (like decomposing peroxide). That aside, the general idea has
merit and has occurred to people before: a lot of metals are excellent
catalysts when seriously hot, so with highly-concentrated peroxide you
might be able to use catalysts (or electric heat) to get things started,
and then just rely on decomposition heat to keep metal screens hot after
that. Getting it started and keeping it going is a bit trickier, though,
especially if you want to do throttling.
(The problem with using heat from farther down the engine to help is
twofold: it's hard to combine the large surface area desirable for
catalysis, e.g. metal screens, with plentiful heat conduction from
somewhere else; and a requirement for greater heat it makes it impossible
to run the engine as a monopropellant system, which is quite useful.)
Hydrazine catalysts used to be like this, incidentally: they worked well
only when hot. All sorts of weird schemes were used until cold-starting
catalysts were developed.
Henry Spencer
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