SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the check-out-glasses-guy-in-the-header-image dept.
According to a press release from the European Space Agency (ESA), a team of scientists from Airbus have succesfully tested a prototype 10 N hydrazine thruster, its chamber and nozzle made out of a platinum–rhodium alloy, printed with "a laser machine normally employed for making jewellery, which is the current industrial state-of-the-art for manufacturing with these metals"
The world's first spacecraft thruster with a platinum combustion chamber and nozzle made by 3D printing has passed its baptism of fire with a series of firings lasting more than an hour and 618 ignitions.
"This is a world first," explains Steffen Beyer of Airbus Defence & Space, managing the project. "The firings included a single burn of 32 minutes, during which a maximum throat temperature of 1253°C was attained.
The main reason for 3D-printing was economical:
"Considering that platinum currently costs €40 a gram [sudo rm -rf: it seems to be more like 30€], 3D printing offers considerable future savings," added Dr Beyer. "We produce 150–200 thrusters in this class per year for different customers. 3D printing should allow shorter production cycles and a more flexible production flow, such as manufacturing on demand."
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gman003 on Saturday June 20 2015, @10:03PM
Oh, there's people who would work with LF2, and worse.
If you want a nice book to read on the topic, I suggest John Clark's "Ignition!".
He was a rocket chemist, figuring out fuels and oxidizers in the 50s and 60s. He was one of the guys who figured out adding a pinch of hydrofluoric acid to red fuming nitric acid would prevent it from corroding aluminum or stainless steel.
At one point, he was tasked with finding an extremely dense fuel, for use on missiles. Someone suggested to him dimethyl mercury as an additive. He actually tried running tests on it, but when he was unable to find anyone who would synthesize 100lbs of dimethyl mercury, he decided the whole idea was rather stupid (it would merely double density at best, while completely trashing all other performance figures and being unbelievably toxic). To demonstrate this absurdity, he wrote a proposal for an engine that injected straight mercury into the chamber. The theoretical math showed quite a nice improvement in impulse per volume by doing this, but he expected such a ludicrous proposal to be shot down instantly.
Instead, the Navy told him to get to work testing it.
Well, he at least managed to fob the job off on a different test lab, one located in the middle of the desert rather than New Jersey, but they did indeed fire a rocket using liquid mercury as an additive, spraying mercury vapor straight into the atmosphere.
Rocket scientists don't give a shit.