Henry Spencer wrote: > As for pump drive, one approach is to run the gas generator's burner at a > balanced mixture ratio, and use water injection to cool the gas down > enough to be compatible with the pump materials. (Arianes 1-4 did this.)
And then there's what the Russians did in the RD-170 etc.: run all the oxygen and a little bit of the fuel in a low-temperature oxygen-rich pre-burner, heating the oxygen enough to boil it and spin the pump turbine before combining it in the chamber with the rest of the fuel. (Just the opposite of the SSME, with its fuel-rich preburner... and since it's denser, pumping all the oxygen up to the preburner inlet pressure costs less in pump power than doing that to all the hydrogen fuel in the SSME...) Air-breathing turbojets have always used "oxidizer cooling", so it's not like there wasn't a precedent... -dave w _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
