Anybody for hypergolic fuels, C, T or Z-Stoff or anything to do with rockets at all?

[TheGreenGoblin]

Since I was a young boy I have always been fascinated with things that go bang, like my uncle before me who managed to blow his thumb off in this pursuit as a child.

I find rockets generally and their engine designs and fuels fascinating and my boyhood heroes were people like Russian Valentin Glushko and the German, Dr. Eugen Sänger, among many others, who made the first test firings, many using so-called hypergolic, or, crudely, fuel components that self or spontaneously ignite when they come into contact.

Sänger, for instance, used liquid (or sometimes gaseous) oxygen and a light fuel oil and used an clever chemical trick to get his motor firing. He filled the part of his fuel line next to the motor with diethyl zinc, to act as what we now call a “hypergolic starting slug.” When this was injected into the motor and hit the oxygen it ignited spontaneously, so that when the fuel oil arrived the fire was already burning well. Sad to relate it was this basic hypergolic fuel ignition concept using other chemicals and fuels such as the 'Stoff' noted in the thread title, that resulted in the engine that powered the Messerschmitt Me 163B Komet aircraft, and other destructive German rockets during the war. Wunderwaffen that were not so wonderful at all really at the time.

Ended up working for the French

[k3k3]

Avpin returns!

[TheGreenGoblin]

Avpin returns!

Isopropyl nitrate!

I found this wonderful anecdote about that very substance lurking on this site...

http://rhodesianforces.org/No1sqnavpin.html

[TheGreenGoblin]

Why was the hypersonic X-15 painted black I ask you and wonder myself?

Another question that bugs my cement head from time to time? I mean, wouldn't you want to paint your aircraft white to radiate that heat away, like the Concorde did so effectively at transonic speeds!

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/his ... 1spch.html

After reading the link above I am guessing that as a research aircraft the boffins wanted something that was as close to the hypothetical "black body" as possible to allow a baseline for understanding the ability of an aircraft with a known drag profile and metallic construction to handle friction induced heating at specific speeds and altitudes?

[Alisoncc]

Cos the white paint had all been used up painting kerbs, and rocks and fings, and the green used for painting patches of burnt grass around the pans.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Cos the white paint had all been used up painting kerbs, and rocks and fings, and the green used for painting patches of burnt grass around the pans.

As ever in the military... You are probably right.

[ian16th]

Another question that bugs my cement head from time to time? I mean, wouldn't you want to paint your aircraft white to radiate that heat away, like the Concorde did so effectively at transonic speeds!

......and the Vickers Valiant!

XD 816 with 214 matkings 1968 s.jpg (34.38 KiB) Viewed 4887 times

[TheGreenGoblin]

......and the Vickers Valiant

All the better to protect the aircraft from the nuclear flash.

I remember reading somewhere that a US spy aircraft got a little too close to the Russian detonation of the Tsar Bomba and was significantly charred by the flash, x-rays and so on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

The bomb was detonated at the Sukhoy Nos ("Dry Nose") cape of Severny Island, Novaya Zemlya, 15 km (9.3 mi) from Mityushikha Bay, north of Matochkin Strait.The detonation was secret but was detected by US Intelligence agencies. The US apparently had an instrumented KC-135R aircraft (Operation SpeedLight) in the area of the test, close enough to have been scorched by the blast

https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/ ... cs_of.html

The crew were pretty much cooked by radiation too as that interesting article highlights.