[AR] Re: Fw: Hydrogen / oxygen news
- From: Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:59:51 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 31 Oct 2013, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
> > there has long been interest in systems that slowly electrolyze water and
> > store the resulting gases to be burned (much more rapidly) in a GOX/GH2
> > thruster...
>
> Bigelow had Orion Propulsion develop such a system (water electrolysis
> -> stored GOX & GH2 -> orbital RCS thrusters) for their Sundancer
> module. Sundancer was then cancelled in favor of the larger BA330...
> Any more recent word on how Bigelow is doing with that?
I haven't heard anything specific, although I'm not a serious
Bigelow-watcher. From what I'd seen as of a couple of years ago, Orion
had definitely built the thruster, but it wasn't clear to me that the
electrolysis and storage parts of the job had actually been addressed yet.
In real life, those are the hard parts. Given that you want high storage
pressures to get sizable amounts of gas into small tanks, the temptation
is to run the electrolysis cell at high pressure (since it's a lot cheaper
to push water in against a high pressure than to compress gas), and that
ups the ante on things like keeping the GOX and GH2 100% separate. (At
1atm, you can actually get away with generating and using mixed GOX/GH2;
this is done in some little welding systems aimed at jewelers and such --
Google "Brown's gas" for details. At high pressure, that's suicidally
dangerous.)
> RE the explosions you cite, any more details on who that happened to?
Not without doing a lot of reference-chasing -- that was a long time ago.
Henry Spencer
henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
(regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)
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