New answers tagged lox
1
As he says the charcoal in the experiment is very hot (plus charcoal has a lot of carbon dust all over it, which is really flammable stuff), even then the charcoal doesn't burn until after it bounces out of the liquid oxygen, having vaporised some oxygen. To summarise we have hot carbon dust in an almost pure oxygen atmosphere.
By contrast COPV's use carbon ...
10
Short answer:
shock loads due to high acceleration of the turbopump shaft
rubbing between critical seals and other moving parts
fatigue in the impeller section
Directly quoting from this link:
The turbine to drive the separate propellant pumps was an impressive piece of machinery itself-it developed 410 000 watts (55 000 brake horsepower). Designers ...
8
The four destructive LOX pump failures had happened at 110, 110.5, 107.7 and 109 sec; this looked statistically significant, but after much study the team wrote it off to a freak coincidence. Rocketdyne beefed up the impeller vanes, made changes to eliminate fretting and set a 3,500 sec life-limit on impellers used for ground testing. Flight engines never ...
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