[AR] Re: Electroforming Experiment
- From: Ben Brockert <wikkit@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2019 20:24:51 -0700
On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 7:55 PM Ed LeBouthillier
<codemonky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So were the channel serrations visible on the inner wall or the outer
wall or was the material thick enough to cover it completely? I'm just
wondering about the smoothness of the combustion chamber wall.
Yes, they were visible, like a tube bundle engine. It was just a
process prototype; the channels were larger than what would actually
work for regen so that the part itself could be smaller. I had another
version of it where it had a few channels that went in a spiral that
were the appropriate size, but it was not mechanically stable enough
for the rest of the process.
Would you recommend this approach as a good way? Was your evaluation of
the results beneficial enough to consider this approach worth
duplicating again?
The prototype didn't fully close out the gaps so it was not useful as
an engine. I water flowed it to see how well the manifold design had
worked.
I think it might work as an engine manufacturing process, but is
definitely slow. Filling interstitial surfaces seemed like it would be
a challenge; it's not how plating wants to work. It will be a
development program, certainly. It is not the process I would put
personal funds toward to build a new kind of engine at this point, but
you have an investment in wanting to show that electroforming would
work, while I am more interested in applying open cell metal foam heat
exchange technology to rocket engines.
If it turns out there is a way to infill deep pores with
electroforming then perhaps it can be applied to my problem, but for
now I think other approaches are more promising. Another hybrid
approach would be to plate with a high melting point metal using
whatever technique they use to make vias on PCBs, then fill the rest
of the space with a copper or silver alloy.
Ben
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