[AR] Re: LOX-Methane Kabooms
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 16:07:11 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 24 May 2016, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
You'd need major structural failure with LACK of immediate ignition,
followed by release of the propellants into some sort of containment (a
big pit for the rocket to fall back into?) so they mix in bulk rather
than boil away furiously and disperse...
One way containment might happen is rupture of a common bulkhead. Some of
the Atlas accidents started that way (I don't know if that one reported
detonation accident did, but it seems plausible). The Atlas common
bulkhead was an extreme case: a thin stainless dome held rigid by higher
pressure underneath, with LOX above and kerosene below. If pressurization
got messed up, the bulkhead could invert, which usually ruptured it... and
then you had heavy LOX pouring downward into lighter kerosene, with the
outer shell of the tanks still intact (until LOX boiling burst it), a
situation that could produce considerable mixing even with the LOX boiling
and the kerosene freezing.
Common bulkheads are a bit sporty in general, but they seem particularly
undesirable with readily-miscible propellants, like peroxide/alcohol or
LOX/methane.
One might want to assign a higher TNT equivalent to LOX/methane in
common-bulkhead tanks.
Henry
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