Cryogenic Rocket Engine Forms Icicles

Read more at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/news/cece.html

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• NASA
• Common
• Extensible
• Cryogenic
• Engine
• rocket
• icicle

[silver760]

Very expensive popsicle maker,does it do flavours aswell?

[vblogrsRLzrs]

Hydrogen rocket engine. Burn hydrogen and oxygen, what do you get? H20, water. The blue exhaust is steam, steam at about ~6000 degrees. The icecles form because all that liquid hydrogen is pumped through the nozzle to stop it from melting. its so effective that the edge stays cold enough to form ice.

[yung23567]

nvrmnd..

"which means it has the flexibility to reduce thrust from 100 percent down to 10 percent allowing a spacecraft to gently land on the lunar surface. The 13,800-pound thrust engine uses extremely cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as propellants.

"

[yung23567]

how much thrust is generated ?

[KeyFra2011]

Where is this at?? Is this in some kind of space ship of something??

[PhysicsManual]

@Theonewhoclimbs28 I dont think there is a formula for it... As far as i know its just the maximum energy released when burning one kilogram of the substance (or for nuclear reactions, the amount of energy released when all the atoms of a kilo undergo nuclear reaction). So yeh, ur gonna have to look it up... its a pain :P

[Theonewhoclimbs28]

@PhysicsManual Ok, you know what'd be helpful is if I knew the is if I knew the formula for energy density so I could do it myself. I'll have to look it up. It's the only way I'll ever learn.

[PhysicsManual]

@Theonewhoclimbs28 actually, hydrogen has the highes energy density for any chemical reaction (thats why water is so stable). The only problem is storage, which is why we dont use it in cars. If you want more power you need to go nuclear (i.e. the orion project) ;)

[CrustyBumHol]

its just water

[Nadirion1]

@Theonewhoclimbs28 In multistage rockets it is very beneficial to have very light upper stage with LH2 and LOX. First stages are better with LOX-Kerosene exactly because energy density and tanks don't have to be huge.

[TCreatorO]

they should make a bunch of these to cool down the north pole. lol

[Theonewhoclimbs28]

@vblogrsRLzrs I wonder why H2 + O2 seems to be the go-to fuel for space rockets. Isn't it extremely inconvenient to have to contain cryogenic fluids? Isn't the energy density pretty low for hydrogen? Couldn't they get more thrust per gram of fuel if they went with something with a higher energy density?