When I took the valve out of a bottle to replace it after a couple years in
N2O service and perhaps ten refills (via liquid fill and vapor-phase use) I
looked inside the bottle.
I felt kinda sick when I realized what I was seeing. Polkadots. Little
black polkadots all over the inside of the N2O tank. I made a large swab
and wiped at the dots.
Grease. Black, sticky grease condensed out of solution in the liquid N2O as
it evaporated to feed the engine. Oh joy. I wonder what else was in the N2O
that didn't get left behind in the tank, but helped sensitize the N2O vapor
feeding into a rocket engine. XCOR discontinued the use of N2O after 2007.
On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 1:07 PM Bruno Berger <bruno.berger@xxxxxx> wrote:
Indeed. You normally have no control over your supply chain . We burned
about a metric ton of N2O the last few weeks. Our supplier only delivers
bottles without dip tube. So we flipped the bottles up-side-down to fill
the run tank. You wouldn't believe how much dirt, rust and other objects
were trapped in the filters (even several O-rings which did not come
from our plumbing for sure). And that was "clean" N2O (Means, no
additives to spoil your balloon party) but not medical grade though.
Bruno
Am 20.10.2020 um 20:09 schrieb Doug Jones:
A supercritical positive-heat-of-formation oxidizer with oily
contaminants leached from every step of the distribution chain. What
could possibly go wrong?
On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 11:04 AM Bruno Berger <bruno.berger@xxxxxx
<mailto:bruno.berger@xxxxxx>> wrote:
Am 20.10.2020 um 19:53 schrieb roxanna Mason:
> Is your fuel even less satisfactory?
> Perhaps it's a LOx/solid fuel hybrid and you want to cool your
nozzle.
>
Yep, we discussed that at ARIS for cooling the nozzle with N2O for
their
5kN hybrid. But N2O probably gets super critical which makes me
nervous :-(
Bruno