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New Molecule Could Lead To Better Rocket Fuel
MithrandirAgain writes "Trinitramid is the name of the new molecule that may be a component in future rocket fuel. This fuel could be 20 to 30 percent more efficient in comparison with the best rocket fuels available today, according to researchers (abstract). The discovery was made at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. 'A rule of thumb is that for every ten-percent increase in efficiency for rocket fuel, the payload of the rocket can double. What's more, the molecule consists only of nitrogen and oxygen, which would make the rocket fuel environmentally friendly. This is more than can be said of today's solid rocket fuels, which entail the emission of the equivalent of 550 tons of concentrated hydrochloric acid for each launch of the space shuttle,' says Tore Brinck, professor of physical chemistry at KTH."
From TFA:
"It remains to be seen how stable the molecule is in a solid form," says Tore Brinck.
And until then, this is a premature press release to be criticising the shape shuttle solid rockets.
Someone must need to re-up on their grant.
Rocket fuel was a big research area in the 1950's. Dozens of very good chemists spent a whole load (hundreds of millions of 1950-size dollars) trying to make better rocket fuels.
( One of them wrote a informative and funny book about that time and place ).
The short summary is: Yes, you can make higher oomph rocket fuels and oxidizers with more oxygen in them.
But a lot of the formulas are impractical as:
(0) They were already discovered years ago, and discarded, but chemists don't like to write up their failures, and researchers don't like to read old moldy research summaries anyway.
(1) They're waaay too expensive to make, even for military uses.
(2) They are highly toxic, even more toxic than the widely-used hydrazines, which can kill you in several interesting ways.
(3) They're so unstable, you have to keep them under impossible conditions, like no sound, no vibrations, no light, and under a part per million of crud in the perfectly-smooth and unscratched nickel-plated tanks.
(4) They can't be stored for more than a day or so before the fuel or oxidizer starts decomposing itself or the tank walls.
(5) Too many of the researchers were vaporized while handling the stuff. Literally. Truly. Completely. That tends to make it hard to find substitute researchers to continue working with the same stuff.
(6) For military applications, you need a fuel that can be handled by raw recruits, stored for many months, be pumped quickly into not always totally clean rocket tanks, kept in those loaded rockets for days to months, and tolerate wide temperature swings. These requirements alone disqualify a large percentage of really zippy fuels and oxidizers.
The odds are pretty high against this "new" compound being all that new, or it passing the basic requirements for fuel or oxidizer.
Over the decades, chemists have come up with dozens of molecular structures that would make "the perfect rocket fuel" or "the perfect explosive" (both qualities are closely related). If only they would be stable enough to prevent accidental explosions ("It remains to be seen how stable the molecule is in a solid form"). And be possible to produce in hundreds of tons ("The scientists have also managed to produce enough of the compound in a test tube for it to be detectable.") And most important of all, cheap enough to compete with existing propellants.
Until these problems can be addressed, this "breakthrough" is just another octanitrocubane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane
It's a chemical tour-de-force to synthesize difficult structures like this in the first place, and in that sense, the researchers may have made a valuable contribution to the field of synthetic chemistry, but if you expect rockets with quadruple payloads based on this molecule to be lifting of by 2015, well, don't hold your breath.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4,6-Tris(trinitromethyl)-1,3,5-triazine