I think we did a thousand on an igniter at Masten back in the day. Had
to add a little water cooling jacket to be able to run it at a high
enough frequency to get through it; in the engine it'd be briefly heat
sink and then fuel cooled. Not really any rebuild that could be done
on it.
I don't think it adds a lot of real reliability to the system to do
1000 identical tests. More useful is tests doing things like running
it off-nominal in propellant temperature or pressure, or seeing what
happens in likely failure cases on the valves.
How the igniter acts in the system of the engine is more important; 20
cycle of startup, equilibrium, and shutdown on the propulsion system
will yield more useful information about the igniter than 1000 runs of
it alone. Did 1000 of those at another company for a client and then
they never did anything with the results. Made for a lot of very
boring videos though.
On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 3:39 AM, Lars Osborne <lars.osborne@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Does anyone have data for what is the most number of ignitions performed on
bi-propellant, non-hypergolic rocket igniter without being rebuilt? I know
that XCOR has done thousands of runs on their igniters, but I don't know how
often they get rebuilt or if anyone has performed comparable reliability
tests. What is the state of the art for igniter cycles?
Thanks,
Lars Osborne
