[AR] Re: I took up a crazy challenge!

  • From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2023 15:02:03 -0500 (EST)

On Thu, 9 Feb 2023, Matthew JL wrote:

I do not think an aerospike has the kind of surface area needed to run an expander cycle off of - the actual engineering aside.

Aerospikes -- even the more cautious designs which use a row of small conventional chambers with minimal nozzles merging into the aerospike, instead of trying to build a toroidal chamber -- traditionally have problems with cooling the plug surface, so this might work okay. (Even fairly drastic truncation still leaves quite a bit of external-nozzle surface.)

Simulating this well might be rather challenging.

Henry

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