Questions tagged [solid-fuel]
Questions about solid fuels. The rockets that use them, the fuels that are burned, and the vendors that make them.
69
questions
3
votes
1answer
166 views
The thrust in the calculation of specific impulse
In calculating the specific impulse using the thrust generated as one of the parameters, do we take the total thrust generated or the average thrust over the period of the burn?
$I_{sp} = \frac{F_{...
0
votes
1answer
87 views
Tilted exhaust gases from the rocket nozzle after sonic boom [closed]
Our solid propellant rocket, on test, produces sonic boom. Right after, the plume of exhaust tilts sideways. This will definitely have a gimbal effect during flight. The propellant chamber has one ...
2
votes
1answer
77 views
Why are my empirical and theoretical value of mass flow rate in solid propellant rockets not similar?
For a rocket of:
fuel mass $m_f$ = 6 kg,
Thrust = 3.1 KN, (vs 4K using reducing catalyst to delay burn time)
total powered burn time, $t_b$ = 3.5 s, (using reducing catalyst vs 1.8 sec)
This ...
2
votes
1answer
194 views
What is the max height I can achieve with my solid prop rocket?
For a rocket of:
mass, $m$ = 25kg,
dry mass $m_f$ = 19 kg,
Thrust = 2.1 KN,
total powered burn time, $t_b$ = 3.5 s,
$I_{sp}$ = 129
I get powered burn height = 549 m and total time to max ht of 5506 ...
2
votes
1answer
105 views
Which burning of Solid Propellant is best axial burning or radial Burning?
Which Burning is Better Axial or Radial of Solid Propellant grain used in Solid Rocket Motors?
How Someone Determines which to choose according to the Mission requirements ?
3
votes
1answer
81 views
What are the temperature constraints on various solid rocket boosters?
What are the temperature constraints on various solid boosters/launchers; what are the lowest and highest temperatures they can tolerate? (One answer per booster/launcher/stage)
12
votes
5answers
2k views
Has there ever been a completely solid fuelled orbital rocket? [duplicate]
Engines and fuel management are very expensive to develop, and for smaller launch providers and space agencies this could prevent them from entering the market. My question is, would the cost savings ...
2
votes
3answers
261 views
Can liquid rocket engines have the same thrust as solid rocket engines?
Take the Vega rocket launcher for example. Its first three stages are solid rocket engines and burn at a relatively short time. If I were to change its first stage into a liquid rocket engine, can ...
1
vote
1answer
61 views
What is the effect of calorific value of fuel on the specific impulse of a rocket engine?
What is the effect of calorific value of a fuel on the specific impulse of a rocket engine? Other things remaining the same, and if it is possible to use both, will the same fuel provide the same ...
5
votes
2answers
545 views
Aerospike with solid fuel
I was scrolling in youtube and I saw this awesome video
and I think, if we put an aerospike nozzle in a sounding rocket,or even a small orbital rocket, as a first stage solid booster, this type of ...
14
votes
2answers
1k views
Could one actually make a grain silo rocket?
Watching the recent SpaceX Starship tests got me to thinking:
Could you actually make a rocket using grain as the propellant?
Image from https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-sn5-second-hop-plans/...
6
votes
0answers
134 views
Could the SS520 be used to return a payload from Mars to Earth?
The Japanese SS520-5 nanosat launcher has a payload of 5kg or so to LEO on an all solid fuel rocket with a total mass of about 2.6 tons. To reach LEO its delta-V totalled over all three stages must be ...
6
votes
2answers
822 views
Could HIBEX propellant be used for amateur rockets?
The HIBEX rocket was a precursor to the Sprint missile system deployed briefly back in the 1970s. The rocket was only 18 feet long but had extraordinary performance(an acceleration of 100 G's!). But I ...
8
votes
1answer
2k views
How is solid rocket fuel sourced?
I know that Orbital ATK builds solid rocket boosters, but where do they get the bulk material from? Is there a single supplier or multiple suppliers of solid rocket fuel or do motor manufacturers ...
1
vote
0answers
227 views
Is there any practical application of trinitramide N(NO2)3 in rocket propellants
In 2010 researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden announced the discovery of new compound, trinitramide N(NO2)3, which could revolutionize production of solid rocket propellants....
8
votes
2answers
394 views
Are more details about the fatal rocket motor accident at Cape Canaveral in April 1964 available?
The 1966 book The Life and Death of a Satellite by Alfred Bester contains an account of a accidental ignition of a third-stage solid rocket motor in a Delta rocket spin test facility at the Cape which ...
3
votes
1answer
302 views
What are the advantages of solid iodine propellant and how is it used for ion propulsion?
I was reading about different sources of propellant for ion thrusters, Xenon being the most common. However, in more recent articles I've found more and more mentions of Solid Iodine being used as ion ...
1
vote
2answers
204 views
Are solid-fueled launch vehicles faster to orbit than liquid-fueled ones?
The (relatively) new Kuaizhou family of launch vehicles is described as "quick-reaction", and is based on ASAT and ICBM heritage.
Solid-fueled rockets have been, historically, cheaper to launch on, ...
1
vote
1answer
364 views
Does this Soyuz vehicle burn coal or oil? What is its official name?
This tweet shows the image below and says:
Soyuz rocket on its way to the launch pad (on a train of course).
Question: Does this Soyuz vehicle (a train engine) burn coal or oil? Does it have an ...
4
votes
1answer
190 views
Was there a history of segmented solid rockets prior to the Shuttle?
The Shuttle famously (perhaps infamously) had its solid rocket boosters built in segments, which were transported to KSC and then joined together. The SLS will similarly have segmented SRBs.
Were ...
5
votes
1answer
429 views
What is the requirement of spacer rings in solid rocket motors in sounding rockets?
I saw this report SOLID ROCKET MOTOR DESIGN L-CLASS, here as shown in FIGURE-8, they have charged the motor with grain segments with spacer rings in between. Can`t we charge the motor without any ...
3
votes
0answers
198 views
Why did the nozzles on the SRB's igniter initiator point toward the grain of the main igniter while the main igniter's nozzle pointed straight down?
How did the shuttle designers make those decisions? What made it a better decision to point the exhaust of the igniter initiator toward the main igniter's grain at an angle? What made it a better ...
9
votes
3answers
1k views
Why doesn't Rocket Lab use a solid stage?
I was just reading about the Scout, an all-solid rocket, and thought of Rocket Lab's Electron, which seems to have a similar mission of deploying small payloads to orbit. I understand the engines to ...
6
votes
1answer
376 views
Which rockets use(d) solid-fuel upper stages?
The Antares is unusual in that it's using solid-fuel in the second stage. I was surprised about that and a couple of questions immediately popped up which are already covered on this site: How can a ...
6
votes
0answers
335 views
How do HMX-fuelled rockets launch without exploding?
Unlike most civilian solid-fuel rockets, which use ammonium perchlorate/aluminium fuels with a rubber binder (known in the industry as ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, or APCP for short), ...
2
votes
2answers
248 views
Solid hydrogen hybrid motor engine for launch?
Would hydrogen unlike water in a solid state take less space or be more stable? How would a rocket work using a block of melting solid hydrogen instead of liquid hydrogen? Has and could any kind of ...
3
votes
1answer
206 views
How do you avoid wasting oxidizer when designing a hybrid rocket?
I was thinking of designing a very simple and small Paraffin rocket engine as an experiment. One thing that I don't understand about these designs is how you efficiently use your oxidizer without a ...
5
votes
0answers
94 views
How much would mass-production impact the cost of solid-fuel rockets?
Let's imagine that, for some arbitrary reason, solid-fuel rocket stages were needed and built en masse in factories, like planes or even like cars.
How much would it drive down the cost of an ...
10
votes
1answer
408 views
Why were large solid-fuel rockets so rare in the past?
When the Germans projected the A4 missile, they discarded solid-fuel propulsion and went on to circumvent the enormous technical difficulties of building a liquid-fuel engine from scratch. Germany had,...
4
votes
2answers
830 views
Have there been any spacecraft with internal SRM other than CONTOUR?
I read about the CONTOUR mission which used an internal solid rocket motor to change the trajectory. Have there been other spacecraft using a solid rocket motor which is not jettisoned after usage?
10
votes
2answers
516 views
Why aren't airbreathing SRBs a thing?
To the best of my knowledge, all solid rocket boosters so far use a propellant that is a solid mixture of both the fuel and the oxidiser parts of the reaction. However, given that SRBs are generally ...
16
votes
1answer
501 views
How far have autophage rockets been developed?
Ars Technica reports on a May 24 phys.org press release/precis on a University of Glasgow paper in Journal of Spacecraft of Rockets about a solid rocket intended to consume itself during use rather ...
14
votes
4answers
3k views
Do launchers using only solid propellant exist?
The question is restricted to launchers that have already been used to launch an object into orbit before today (April 2018).
Some military ballistic missiles run only on solid propergol (e.g. the ...
2
votes
0answers
108 views
Which solid fuel is optimal for light rocket?
I am in search of comparatively cheap and powerful enough solid fuel. I've found rocket candy, but is it enough to reach 1km altitude?
(My aim is a 2 metre high rocket with 0.5kg of payload.)
6
votes
1answer
1k views
Why did Virgin Galactic switch back to HTPB after one launch using thermoplastic polyamide (i.e. nylon)?
A subsection of Second-generation engine in Wikipedia's article on RocketMotorTwo says:
New fuel formulation
Rather than use rubber-based HTPB in the solid portion of the hybrid rocket motor—which ...
18
votes
2answers
5k views
Do the solid rocket boosters of the Shuttle and SLS have a self-destruct system and was it activated during the Challenger disaster?
Videos of the Challenger shuttle explosion show both solid boosters speeding on after the main tank detonated. Were they eventually self-destructed by the ground control, or why not, and why not ...
19
votes
1answer
6k views
How were the Space Shuttle SRBs ignited? (with what?)
I'm unable to find how exactly the Space Shuttle's SRBs were ignited, or what exactly was used to ignite the rocket.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to instantly ignite a solid rocket reliably,...
13
votes
1answer
2k views
How does a solid propellant in a rocket work?
I'm a bit confused about how the fuel manages to get from wherever its being stored in a spacecraft into the engines, seeing as it is supposedly solid and so seems like it wouldn't be easy to move. ...
7
votes
1answer
301 views
Why was the Minotaur V built as a 5-stage design?
Why is Orbital Science's Minotaur V rocket a five stage design? I am aware this is derived from an ICBM design, but why would anyone want a five stage design for launching non-lethal payloads? It ...
2
votes
0answers
933 views
Could Sodium metal be used in rocket fuel?
For instance, I read that the Hercules X-265 rocket motor used in the Sprint missile was a solid double base propellant that used nitrocellulose with zirconium metal staples and nitroglycerin as a ...
14
votes
1answer
3k views
What solid fuel was used in the Katyushas rocket artillery of WW2?
The Katyushas were invented by the Soviets and used in WW2. They were trucks with rails firing a bunch of small rockets with a range of 3 to 12 km.
These were solid-fuel rockets, but I would like to ...
7
votes
2answers
1k views
Why isn't someone building a fully reusable solid fuel rocket?
Solid rocket motors are so much simpler than liquid fueled. Why isn't e.g. SpaceX making a Falcon 9 equivalent with solid fuel only, and rescuing the segment cases with parachutes like the shuttle ...
3
votes
1answer
743 views
Comparison between solid rocket fuels. Which are better by performance and cost? [closed]
I am interested for a comparison of solid rocket fuels by their performance and cost. Comparison by specific impulse (Isp), energy that gives (which one is more energitic), density, cost to ...
13
votes
3answers
857 views
Why are there so few solid rocket satellite launchers?
At first glance, solid rocket launching makes more sense than liquid:
Simple to scale. Once designed, it can be made perfectly the same, all the time.
Storage - Keep for as long as you want, launch ...
8
votes
2answers
2k views
What is the correct thrust curve for a solid rocket with a simple circular hole, and why?
Going to wikipedia's article on solid-fuel rockets, I come across some graphs of thrust curves for certain bore-hole geometry. Right now I'm interested in the simplest bore-hole: a circular hole right ...
11
votes
1answer
864 views
What ever happened to SpinSat - did it work?
I can find several descriptions of what the SpinSat satellite was supposed to do. I can find some nice images of it being deployed from the ISS also. But I haven't been so successful in understanding ...
11
votes
1answer
3k views
How does an Electric Solid Propellant rocket work?
I saw the section in Wikipedia about Electric Solid propellants but I can't figure out what it really is, and how it works. It sounds like a solid propellant rocket that you can start and stop ...
11
votes
5answers
2k views
What limits burning speed of solid propellant?
SRBs and missiles use grain to regulate thrust over time, as only exposed surface of the propellant burns.
But what causes propellant to burn only on the surface, and regulates the speed at which the ...
8
votes
3answers
414 views
Burn 1st stage structural material as fuel?
Aluminum/Magnesium alloys can burn quite nicely. The stoichiometry is favoriable. Instead of $CO_2$ which is mostly oxidizer by mass, you might end up with $Al_2O_3$ and $MgO$ as exhaust.
The ...
6
votes
1answer
780 views
What does “supersonic large amplitude ID maneuver PTI” mean, and what does a tumble motor do?
In this question I linked to a YouTube video of the Ares X-1 launch. You can start listening at 02:00 for the point where these are mentioned:
"Supersonic large ...