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NASA Announces Enviromentally Friendly Jet Fuel
drama writes "From the Press Release: 'Two years of collaboration between Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., and NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have led to the development of a non-toxic, easily handled fuel made from a substance similar to what is used in common candles. The by-products of combustion of the new fuel are carbon dioxide and water; unlike conventional rocket fuel that produces aluminum oxide and acidic gasses, such as hydrogen chloride.' Or for pictures and more info, visit the site."
Woot! I feel sorry for all the bees that NASA will be milking, just to make enough rocket fuel for the next launch..
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
This is all we need.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
jet fuel != rocket fuel
Just like petroleum! How environmentally friendly! (sarcasm aside, this is a step forward from existing fuels, but ecotopia it ain't)
They should just fill it with coke and shake it then take the lid off sending it into orbit. Sometimes the simple solutions are the best.
The by-products of combustion of the new fuel are carbon dioxide and water
Isn't that the whole global warming thing? That we're releasing too much carbon dioxide and its causing a global warm up?
The Anti-Blog
One of those would be a gigantic step towards a better environment. Unfortunately, this isn't it.
It's not jet fuel, it's ROCKET FUEL. Put it in a jet and it goes BOOM!!!!!
Jet fuel is what is put in most(all?) airliners. Rocket fuel is what you use to get into space, and maybe other "fun" applications.
Change the title.
Erioll
Cheap and clean is the key to colonizing the solar system. When it costs relatively little to lift people and habitats into orbit is when the mass migration to space will begin. Environmentally friendly exhaust is a nice bonus that will help disarm Green opposition to such ventures.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Then again, can anyone say 'metal fatigue in 2 seconds'?
/.'s 10 Millionth
The story says jet fuel, but the article says rocket fuel. There's a big difference, isn't there?
If it was jet fuel, and it was cheap enough to make Nasa could sell the rights to produce it and become more self sufficient. If it's rocket fuel though, there would be much less of a market and would really only benefit them.
Too bad this wasn't done in the 80s, the Challenger crew could have just grabbed the candle wick and climbed down.
Trolling is a art,
BAD MODERATOR no Karma for you
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
Parent is a goatse.cx link, don't mod up...
Slashdotting (DDOS) a .gov site can get you 20 years to life. Chrisd, you're about to be classigied as an enemy of the state.
Granted, a rocket launch probably belches out a LOT of these chemicals, but there is a launch how often? Not very often, last I recall. The polution they produce is negligable compared to the total polution cars produce.
NASA should be spending this money on more important endeavors, such as the ISS or perhaps even another moon trip. Blowing money to produce environmentally safe rocket fuel is stupid and inefficient.
Why can't we use it in our cars?
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IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
"led to the development of a non-toxic"... I think they meant "less-toxic".
IN late news MS file sIP claim onNASA discovery claiming..
That only they can light the candle!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
While I understand that releasing the chemistry behind this step forward would be a bad idea, I would LOVE to know how they did it. How the hell do you get paraffin to ignite with the power to throw a rocket into space? Interesting, none the less.
Now just imagine a beowu....ahhh, screw it.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Now they can launch their SCUD missiles full of Anthrax, Botulism, or whatever, and need not be concerned about polluting the atmosphere!
$u(k 1t!!!!11!
I'm gonna keep using gasoline. You know, terrorist and all that.
of explosive of choice for ALL GOOD eco-terrorists :).
:) 1/4 tank of mondo octane goodness...
How long before my car will run on a derivitive of this ? I remember getting av-gas when in high school for the friday night drags
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This is NOT a jet fuel, this is a component of a rocket fuel.
In fact, jet fuel is highly refined kerosene, or what the Brits used to call "parafin oil" - because it is a relative of the parafin wax used to seal canning jars, and MAKE CANDLES!
This fuel is a solid form of parafin that, when combined with a liquid or gaseous oxidizer makes a rocket.
The idea is this:
a purely liquid fuel rocket has 2 liquids you have to handle, the oxidizer and the fuel (e.g. LO2 and kerosene, LO2 and LH2, etc.) That's twice as many hoses, twice as many turbopumps, twice as much to go wrong.
A purely solid fuel rocket has no liquids, but once lit off, it will burn until all the fuel is gone. You cannot throttle it down, stop it, or restart it - the best you can do is eject it.
A hybrid rocket uses a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. You can throttle it by varying the flow rate on the oxidizer. You can stop it, and restart it again. You still need some tubing for the oxidizer, and a turbopump, but only one.
However, I doubt the only reaction products from this are carbon dioxide and water - more likely you are going to get unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and water.
Granted, that's nicer than what the SRB's on the Shuttle use - aluminum and ammonium perchlorate IIRC.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was going to say something about jet fuel not being the same as rocket fuel, and calling everyone on slashdot (bar myself, of course) an idiot, but I think I was beaten to it.
Quite a few times in fact.
*smacks self* AIIIIGH!!! I'm so STUPID!!!
>:-(
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Actually, paraffins are a broad class of hydrocarbons not just the familiar candle wax. Paraffins are characterized by having unsaturated C=C bonds, whereas olefins are all saturated C-C bonds. Not sure what kinds of paraffins would have the kind of energy density they would need for rocketry level thrust, maybe aromatics?
As a ChE, this is cool. But the really interesting part is the oxidizer (which they give no details on) and the nozzle. Vapourizing and mixing must be amazingly fast.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
It's ROCKET fuel, not JET fuel. Totally different animals.
Who cares I want to know what oxidizer they are using. I think one of the pictures said LOX on it but I could not really tell.
Got Code?
A most wonderful press release to be sure. Easy to iendly emmissions....blah blah blah. Nowhere in the press release is there anything giving any clue as to how the thrust produced with this fuel compares to current "non-hybrid" fuel.
From the release replacement boosters would have to be "somewhat longer". Indeed, most likely such vague language is there for a reason, and we will not be exploring the Sol system on the backs of swarms of angry bees anytime soon.
Just in time too.....since we will be depopulating the ISS soon.....::sigh::
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather
because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs
when people started talking about 1 launch a month or 1 launch a week, the amount of chlorine that would be placed in the upper atmoshpere whould be enough to destroy the entire ozone layer in a few decades. The only comparable natural phenomena is a volcanic eruption which puts even more chlorine (and other acids) into the upper atmoshere than a shuttle launch.
with china, japan, north korea, europe and boeing all coming on line as rocket launch systems this is going to be increasingly important. Of course not all of these are solid fuel rockets (the culprit).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
is it me, or does the picture at http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2003/03image s/paraffin/medium/Rocketfire04.jpg look furiously like a photorealistic rendering ?
The way the shrubberies stick out in front, and the glimmering on the metal structures on the right all look so unreal...
And the flame really looks like a particle rendered image.
Am I the only one ?
PS please pardon my bad english...
First of all, NASA has a LONG way to go before it has a launch frequency high enough for any pollution from their launch vehicles to be significant.
Second, there are plenty of rocket designs for liquid rockets that already produce only water or water and CO2; so an "environmentally friendly rocket" is not a new thing. The Saturn V, for example used Kerosene for fuel.
What is significant news for nerds is that this is work on a hybrid rocket design. Hybrid rocket motors are interesting because they combine some of the benifits of solid and liquid designs... but that probably wouldn't be considered newsworthy to mainstream media outlets. So, my guess is that this NASA center wrote up a press release and stuck in the magic words "environmentally friendly" to get the news to give them some coverage. The fact that we don't need eco-rockets yet, or that other minimally polluting rocket designs have been around for over half a century are irrelevent because the people they are selling themselves to don't have a background in rocketry, don't bother to check their facts, and many of them feel happy inside when they think they are helping to fund something that protects Mother Earth. And meanwhile the pros and cons of hybrid rocket designs (and probably the things that the test program was really supposed to find out) don't get any attention at all.
Call me when they are testing cubane fuels.
Must be a very poor design, I do not see any mach diamonds ...
Got Code?
Only problem is, we need to find new supplies of Unobtanium to be able to build it. Oh, and the "force of the earth spinning around" part is wrong, too... read Niven and Barnes' "Dream Park" series, or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series, which has a pretty accurate model of what happens when there's an "oops" somewhere along your 36,000+ km cable and it decides to wrap itself around your planet a few times.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
my bad
If I remember correctly, water vapor is a "more powerful" greenhouse gas than CO2. In fact CO2 is a relativly weak greenhouse gas. There are many gasses that have a greater effect on the greenhouse effect than CO2, and water vapor is one of them, granted CO2 is by far the greenhouse gas that is produced the most.
...interesting if true.
The web site is short on details. They are saying that this new motor has the ability to throttle down and reignite. Depending on how well it can do this, you might be able to replace liquid rockets altogether.
t s/aiaa-hr.pdf, which doesn't indicate that it needs to be cooled, and says the specific impulse is about 20% better than kerosene. I'm assuming they mean Kerosene/LOx and not Kerosene/H2O2.
Also, they are talking about scaling the technology up from the demonstrator to space shuttle size with only a slight size penalty. This is all good, except they didn't mention the specific impulse of the fuel vs. the current solid boosters.
Much better info can be found at http://thomasc.stanford.edu/research.html, which suggests that this "solid" mixture must be cooled to keep it solid. However, a better source is http://store.aiaa.org/images/about/02_TC_Highligh
I would still like to see numbers on this stuff.
But how long before the world's salmon supply gets depleted? More short-sighted NASA tomfoolery.
Elegance is for tailors. -A. Einstein
They can do it for jets, but not for regular automobiles? Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Things like BioDiesel would hurt Dubya and his Oil pumping buddies down in Texas. And who wants to bet that that fuel will only be available to the Militry right off the bat? I highly doubt a squadron of F117-A's are punching that nasty hole in the ozone...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
This is a new type of solid rocket fuel. Current high-grade solid rocket fuels use aluminum powders and such like. All jet fuels already produce "only" CO2 and water on combustion, as do many popular liquid rocket fuels (such as LOX/LH2 and LOX/Kerosene, the two most popular rocket fuels for launch vehicles).
I saw somewhere some idea for a device called a space elevator.
It's a time-honored Sci-Fi device, right up there with agropoloi and flying cars.
The reason why we haven't built one yet is, in a nutshell, time(/money) and technology.
Every little bit of that space elevator needs to be strong enough to hold the entire thing--and the thing is going to be the largest thing ever constructed. Period.
Oh, and there is that little problem of actually getting it it up in the first place...
And for every person who thinks NASA produces nothing useful, two words: Compact Disc
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
from the press release:
A hybrid rocket uses a liquefied oxidizer that is gasified before being injected into the combustion chamber containing the solid fuel.
GASIFIED?!?! couldn't they have used a word that at least SOUNDS scientific? Is Aerosolized OK? How about "rendered gaseous"?
I'm not sure I want to trust the future of space travel to people who "gasify" things.
hmmmm?
To use this in automobiles. That would put a stake in the hearts of those in the middle east (assuming it's not oil based).
It seems to me that paraffin is pretty light versus its volume (low density). I wonder how much thrust per gram can be generated, and if this will make rockets or jets any cheaper.
You see, that is SIMPLE, CHEAP, and doesn't change the way we live. And we can have that, now can we?
Theoretically, carbon nanotubes have the strength you need, but another problem is finding a large mass to anchor the top of the elevator (launch it with mass driver from the moon?). With the conservation of momentum, every load you haul up will pull down the top just a little bit.
Isn't combustion of a hydrocarbon by definition supposed to only leave you with H2O and CO2? It is only in imperfect combustion that you get carbon monoxide and when you add other things that it starts making NOx, sulfides and other unfriendly gasses. For example Methane and Oxygen. CH4 + O2 = CO2 and H2O. Propane (C3H8) and Oxygen (O2) = CO2 and H2O. The only difference is the amounts of CO2 and H2O produced. If you watch a vehicle with a V8 engine at a red light, you will frequently see water dripping out of the tail pipe. So it is good that NASA has "discovered" hydrocarbons. :)
I'm probably posting this to the wrong place, but, whatever... where I come from, "enviromentally" is misspelled, it should be "environmentally"..
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
John Carmack, are you out there?
Can this fuel be used for amateur or semi-professional space ventures? Does it give any advantages over using, say, Peroxide fuel? How does the energy release/pound compare?
I know Peroxide is pretty nasty stuff, so it would be cool if a safer to handle alternative came down the pike.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's not rocket science. Um... never mind.
Whazzap Y'all! Bill McNeal rocking the mic again cold representin' rocket fuel malt liquor. It's got the mad flavor that takes any situation to the next level. So when the party starts bouncing and the ladies start bumping, tighten up yo' flow with Rocket Fuel. Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor! DAMN!
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
Rockets use RP-1, a purified form of kerosene. Regular kerosene has impurities that clog up parts of the rocket motor during sustained operation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
it's like the southpark episode with the underwear gnomes... 1. Steal underpants. 2. ?????? 3. Take over the world!!!
tcpa SUX!!!!
to a Chevy Impala on an Arizona dessert road we can give some teeth to that Urban Legend.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
This claim was soundly refuted that same year by "The Space Shuttle's Impact on the Stratosphere", by Prather, Garcia, etc.. You and the guy who started this thread would do well to read that issue of Journal of Geophysical Research.
Where does the ph thing come from? First time I've ever heard that one.
Do a google search for "Burdakov" and "Roswell". The man's credibility is suspect.
According to a quote in this press release, the parrafin-based engines can be throttled, shutdown and even restarted, all of which are impossible with current solid-rocket motors.
Yay! Now we can fuel all those armageddon inducing nuclear missiles with enviromentally friendly fuel!
Like I said - Unobtainium. We're missing about a dozen technologies before we can even try something like this with carbon nanotubes - like ways to mass-produce enough of them to create a 100m wide, 36,000+km long structure (nano meaning "really tiny" to those who don't know - and that's referring to their length); then there's how we bond 'em together, attach things (like said elevator) to 'em, repair them - and, as you mentioned, get it up there in the first place.
The theorists have an answer for the conservation of momentum thing - we anchor it to a sizable asteroid at geosync, and stretch the tether outward to slingshot loads into space. Plus, whenever one "elevator car" starts up, another starts down.
Wonder what a nice thunderstorm would do to something like this? Noone's experimented with conductors that go out past the inner Van Allen belts before....
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
here's why:
Solid boosters are great because they are easier to handle than liquids, but most of all, because whatever weight a liquid booster carries around as turbopumps, plumbing, pre-combustion chambers etc, can now be given to PAYLOAD. That funny little bit of the rocket that actually does something other than look spectacular.
The design and manufacturing simplicity also reduces cost, which also lets us send more PAYLOADS up!
So a nice simple solid has a couple of nasty problems, too. i) uneven burning rates (thrust) is hard to overcome, causing vibration ii) no liquids to cool the nozzle with, so higher nozzle weight iii) can't shut it down, so no abort iiii) no throttle to control thrust, so payload shroud and carry through structure has to be heavier to accommodate higher MAXQ, AKA maximum aerodynamic pressure.
So the next thought is Hybred! Meter the LOX oxidizer flow, and you overcomesall these problems! COOL!! (but not so easy)
Uhh.... how do you get the fuel to stay solid, until it is really needed for burning? and ... Uhh... What keeps the solid fuel from melting, and just running out of the "tailpipe"? Idea!!: Make it hard to melt! OOPS! it also doesn't become available for combustion!
So here's what's done:
Put in a little pre-burner at the top of the solid fuel, a "heater" for evaporation of the fuel! Run the vaporized fuel through a restrictor into a second combustion chamber down by the nozzle. Also feed the second combustion chamber with the right amount of LOX, and well, you get the picture.
Not all that simple to model and control in practice. And it's very hard to find dense fuels that melt, vaporize, and burn just right.
So whatever this guy is doing is potentially very useful, and in any case, it's real rocket science, not simple stuff!
For those wondering why this is getting funded, or whether rocket exhaust has significant environmental effects, I found an interesting page floating around:
http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/background.html
some highlights:
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Saturn V Rocket (1975)
Due to a malfunction, the Saturn V Rocket burned unusually high in the atmosphere, above 300 km. This burn produced "a large ionospheric hole" (Mendillo, M. Et al., Science p. 187, 343, 1975). The disturbance reduced the total electron content more than 60% over an area 1,000 km in radius, and lasted for several hours. It prevented all telecommunications over a large area of the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon was apparently caused by a reaction between the exhaust gases and ionospheric oxygen ions. The reaction emitted a 6300 A airglow. Between 1975 and 1981 NASA and the US Military began to design ways to test this new phenomena through deliberate experimentation with the ionosphere.
Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)
Part of the plan to build the SPS space platforms was the demand for reusable space shuttles, since they could not afford to keep discarding rockets. The NASA Spacelab 3 Mission of the Space Shuttle made, in 1981, "a series of passes over a network of five ground based observatories" in order to study what happened to the ionosphere when the Shuttle injected gases into it from the Orbit Maneuvering System (OMS). They discovered that they could "induce ionospheric holes" and began to experiment with holes made in the daytime, or at night over Millstone, Connecticut, and Arecibo, Puerto Rico. They experimented with the effects of "artificially induced ionospheric depletions on very low frequency wave lengths, on equatorial plasma instabilities, and on low frequency radio astronomical observations over Roberval, Quebec, Kwajelein, in the Marshall Islands and Hobart, Tasmania" (Advanced Space Research, Vo1.8, No. 1, 1988).
Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985)
An innovative use of the Space Shuttle to perform space physics experiments in earth orbit was launched, using the OMS injections of gases to "cause a sudden depletion in the local plasma concentration, the creation of a so called ionospheric hole." This artificially induced plasma depletion can then be used to investigate other space phenomena, such as the growth of the plasma instabilities or the modification of radio propagation paths. The 47 second OMS burn of July 29, 1985, produced the largest and most long-lived ionospheric hole to date, dumping some 830 kg of exhaust into the ionosphere at sunset. A 6 second, 68 km OMS release above Connecticut in August 1985, produced an airglow which covered over 400,000 square km.
During the 1980's, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45 meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer)
the development of a non-toxic, easily handled fuel made from a substance similar to what is used in common candles.
All these years and they've finally gotten around to seeing if wax would burn?
I didn't read the article, but I need to know -- should I invest in goose down before the gov. contract goes through?
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Three posts in this thread get moderated as "trolls" for what are obviously political reasons, then two minutes later you post as an AC with a nasty incoherent response.
Hope you enjoyed the last mod points you'll ever get.
You got things backwards there. Paraffins are saturated compounds with empirical formula C(n)H(2n+2). For example, octane has formula C8H18. As the carbon chain increases in length for a paraffin (I prefer the modern term alkane- the name paraffin also describes a solid unsaturated hydrocarbon, C25H52), the melting and boiling points increase. In other words, simple alkanes like methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6) are gases at room temperature. Butane (C4H10) and pentane (C5H12) boil right around room temperature. The alkane series consists of steadily thickening liquids- compare the viscosities of gasoline (mostly octane) and diesel fuel (mostly hexadecane aka cetane,C16H34). Around 20 carbons, the alkanes start to become solid around room temperature. When they mention a fuel similar to paraffin, I'm guessing they mean something similar to the candle paraffin then, around 23-27 carbons. Olefins (better name: alkenes) are the ones with double bonds in them, and are so named because they tend to produce oily liquids at room temperature. A simple comparision is availble in your kitchen- saturated fats, mostly from animals, tend to be solid at room temperature, whereas unsaturated vegetable fats tend to be liquids (like corn or canola oil) When you see a solid vegetable fat, like in margarine, chances are it has been partially hydrogenated, which converts some of the double bonds to single bonds, increasing the melting point.
It is generally going to be alkanes and not alkenes that you would see used as fuel, due to the combustion properties. Alkenes are much more reactive compounds generally- instead of complete combustion, you'd likely get a ton of nasty side reactions- polymerizations, epoxidations. These reactions make alkenes much more valuable as a starting point in synthesis of plastics and other materials. So, examining alkanes as fuels, it becomes apparent that the longer the chain, the more energy can be extracted from complete combustion. However, the longer the chain, the more oxygen will be needed to produce complete combustion. If complete combustion fails to occur, then the end products will include carbon monoxide and soot.
In a rocket engine, the rocket supplies its own oxidizer, as there isn't much oxygen in space. As such, I'm less interested in the fuel this hybrid rocket will use, and more in the liquid oxidizer (which is not described in the article). IIRC, the space shuttle uses liquid oxygen from the big red external tank (along with liquid hydrogen from the same place) to power it early on, but the main engine of the orbiter is also equipped to burn (once the external tank runs dry) hydrazine (N2H4, one of the most thoroughly awesome substances in the universe) with dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) as an oxidizer. These fuels work very well as rocket fuel, as they are storable at room temperature as liquids, unlike the cryogens used in the external tank, and they are hypergolic, meaning that they spontaneously explode when placed in contact with each other. This is actually a really good thing for a rocket, since you don't need some sort of complex igniter system, and you can easily turn the rocket on and off by opening and closing the fuel valves (unlike the current solid rocket boosters on the sides, which burn continously like fireworks rockets). If you were to use some sot of solid alkane fuel in the boosters, then you'd want to find an oxidizer, preferably not a cyrogenic one, that was able to deliver a large amount of oxygen very quckly to the fuel. In the current SRB, this is conveniently done by aluminum perchlorate- essentially, you get the fuel and oxidizer in one compound. However, it seems for environemntal and control (like I said, burns like a fireworks rocket) reasons, NASA wants to phase this out. Dinitrogen tetroxide is a possibility for an oxidizer, but when nitrogen compunds are involved in combustion, NOx nitrogen oxides are often formed, which are also pollutants. Also, one can only guess the side reactions of a nitrogen oxide with a hydrocarbon in very high energy combustion- isocyanates, cyanides- poisonous stuff. Thus, choosing an alkane as a rocket fuel isn't really as intriguing as what they would choose as an oxidizer.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Lots of rockets use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen too..... 2H2 + O2 = 2H20
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
As far I know the liquid rocket booster uses oxygen and hydrogen to combust, because it has the highest energy rate. This result only into only water as combustion gas! Can it be any cleaner? People are again and again see a rocket take of and say all this pollution, but all that comes out of the liquid booster is water vapour.
However what I guess they are talking about are the solid boosters that currently are mountes on the side of the rocket (i.e. Space Shuttle and Ariane 5) there might be improvement, but honestly the number of rockets going up to the sky really has not yet a significant influence on the environment, where i.e. jet planes do have. (remember the ~2 local climate change at night during the total flight stop after september 11th?)
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
The russkies never had it for this fancy aluminium stuff. Igor has been sending up satelites using jetfuel for ages. Their rockets don't look that sexy, but using the motto "more is better", simple jetfuel does very well. If only you yankees stopped looking at your own bellybutton...
as does paraffin...
GRAPH: It's not like we don't have enough CO2 already.
GRAPH: Insistance is futile. CO2 is not being net assimilated.
GRAPH: They don't just have trouble with what kind of fuel it is, but the headline writer has a wierd idea of "friendly" too.
Wrong!
GRAPH: the atmospheric concentration of CO2 fits a logistic sigmoid curve. Logistic sigmoid curves are typical for most nonrenewable resource consumption.
I know the current implementation for this fuel is rockets. My question is: could it be adapted to work in automobiles?
Maybe the automobile engine would have change (keep it a rocket, 0 to 60 1 sec) but that's OK IMO.
Because current hybrid fuels, other than paraffin-based fuels, cannot sustain a high combustion rate, they have found only limited application and are not commercially viable for space applications. Tests at Stanford and Ames have shown the new paraffin-based fuel has a burn rate that is three times greater than that of other hybrid fuels.
They should talk to Silicon Valley darlings like Pets.com, WebVan et al if they want to know about burn rate!
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
Excellent chemistry lesson! I don't think the SSME's burn anything but an H2/O2 mix, however. I'm pretty sure it's either the OMS or RCS that burn N2H4/N2O4, not the SSME's.
SSME=Space Shuttle Main Engine
OMS=Orbiter Manuvering System
RCS=Reaction Control System
By the way, there are several 'flavors' of hydrazine - two are monomethyl hydrazine, and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine. The OMS and RCS use MMH.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It's contrail , not "chemtrail". Condensation trail. Just an artificial cloud. Condensed water vapor suspended in the air.
Oil and Coal are made of dead trees and animals. The Oceans absorb a lot of co2 as well. The earth can handle the co2. It's the Monoxide, Sulfer, and Nitrogen that are the real problem.
Also, the current boosters have a primitive type of "throttle control" in that the amount of surface area burning determines the thrust. Obviously you can't change this during flight, but the shape of the fuel is engineered to provide a particular "thrust curve" over time.
I am not sure how damaging to the environment the current fuel is. If there were a few launches a day then I could see the problem, but as things are I am not sure if there is one. Of course extra fuel is burned off everyday at Thiokol. I learned the hard way that it isn't good for you. While I was there they switched from buring off the extra/unusable fuel late at night to doing it at about 6 pm. Most people leave at about 4 pm. I was going out to get in my car and there seemed to be a lot of fog in the parking lot. About halfway to my car I realized that it wasn't fog, but smoke from the dumped fuel being burned. I hurried to my car and got out of there. I spent the next hour of the drive coughing. When I asked around about it the next day I was told I should NEVER inhale the exhaust. You should also think of this after your airbag goes off, though I would guess that it would be hard to control your breathing in that situation.
This also brings up the point that there are very strict tolerances for the propellant and some amount of it doesn't meet those tolerances each day and is dumped and burned. If this extra propellant could be burned safely then maybe Thiokol could get into the business of selling high-intensity DuraFlame logs for home heating use. :)
Lasers Controlled Games!
I believe some engineers have also proposed interacting with the Earth's magnetic field using power drawn from solar panels so that the space elevator can react to (relatively small) unbalancing forces all along its length.
This is not an environmentally friendly fuel,
it's just less egregious.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Jet fuel is merely kerosene. Since the compressors and other blades in a turbo jet will melt if a high temperature fuel is used, kerosene is the trade-off. Wax-like and fairly light (on the order of paraffin) is has a lower burning temperature than gasolene and deisel, but also has a lower energy per unit volume.
Because the heat of combustion is already very high due to the air-fuel compression proccess, using a fuel like gasolen is out of the question in a jet engine unless the blades are either very stout, or the cooling method is exceptionally good. Deisel is self igniting at pressure, as well as pretty dirty commercially, and can be used in low speed turbines as long as the blades can handle alot of sand-blasting at high temperatures.
A commercial jet's choice of fuels is pretty much decided on how much energy you get per unit weight of fuel divided by the cost of mainentance and the critical failure probibility.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!