[AR] cryo and steel (was Re: Re: Portland State Aerospace Society)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2016 15:38:16 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 20 Apr 2016, Ben Brockert wrote:
No mild steel parts anywhere in the LOX system, and if you bolt the
LOX tank or downstream parts to a steel structure they need thermal
isolation.
It's better not to use ordinary steel for structure at all, at least not
in the vicinity of LOX plumbing. In theory, there's no problem if all the
steel is isolated well enough to stay warm. In practice, "well enough"
almost always contains an implicit "assuming nothing goes seriously wrong"
clause, and if that assumption is ever false, steel embrittlement can turn
a minor failure into a major accident.
(E.g., insulated cryo storage tanks in industry have had catastrophic
structural failures because the designer assumed that only the inner
shell, inside the insulation, needed to be stainless... not considering
the possibility of leaks and spills.)
Henry
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