On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Sean R. Lynch wrote:
> If you ask most ERPS people, the reply will be that in our opinion,
> mixing peroxide with a fuel is unsafe at any ISP. Carmack's opinion
> obviously differs, but I won't change my mind until I see some detonation
> tests, or until Henry Spencer disagrees with me :)
Well, I share some complicity here :-), because I'm the one who found (and
forwarded to John) an old paper on detonation tests of peroxide-fuel-water
mixtures.
(For the truly determined, it's in the June 1958 issue of Jet Propulsion,
aka the American Rocket Society Journal. Amazing the things you find in
old issues of the ARSJ. Like a 1957 paper singing the praises of pulse-
detonation engines and explaining how they're just around the corner...)
That said, I wouldn't be entirely comfortable with such mixtures either.
They are not *grossly* unsafe; there is some history of successful use in
applications like torpedo propulsion. But they strike me as being long on
ways for things to go wrong, and short on graceful failure modes. Just
how heavily that weighs on your mind, compared to other problems like
peroxide supply, is a topic "on which reasonable men may differ".
Henry Spencer
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