[AR] Re: Falcon 9 flight today
- From: Ian Woollard <ian.woollard@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 23:32:53 +0100
On 9 October 2013 20:22, <JMKrell@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> **
> 1. Open a large orifice container of RP-1 in space, liquid or frozen, it
> will completely evaporate.
>
Nope, because it's not supercritical. It would only evaporate completely if
it was supercritical. It simply doesn't have the energy to do that.
What happens is that it starts to evaporate, this loses the latent heat of
vapourisation, which, although much smaller than water, is still pretty
damn substantial. So the temperature of the RP-1 plummets, until it's well
below ambient temperature- it's not going to be at 20C, it's going to be
frozen solid, with *desperately* low vapour pressure, according to google
kerosene-type stuff will freeze out at about -40C, probably even lower than
that in a vacuum.
Then it's going to melt at a rate determined by how quickly it's being
externally heated.
But it's typically in a big shiny aluminum vacuum vessel aka 'thermos
flask' that reflects a lot of the sunshine and the Earthshine, and it's
stone cold- and it has no significant vapour pressure to convect heat to it.
--
-Ian Woollard
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