New answers tagged turbopump
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 ...
1
No. There's no inherent difference due to the design used. The differences are only coming from technological margins.
Imagine your turbine attached to the preburner requires 5 units of bipropellant mix per second to produce enough torque+RPM to propel the pump to transfer 100 units of propellant (any, or mix, whatever you run through the pump) per second. ...
Top 50 recent answers are included