Building rockets in real life

[Ravenchant]

Indeed. Combustion temperatures would be significantly lower as well, around 2000°C, but pressure could become an issue either way. Propane tanks are usually rated for around 17 bar from what I see, which is okay when the tank is full but would quickly drop to less-than-usable levels as the fuel depletes.

[A Fuzzy Velociraptor]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

As a propane cylinder based rocket hardly could fly out from the lower atmosphere, .laughing gas is unnecessary,
Propane cylinders are sometimes flying themselves, thanks to IntakeAir.

Im not entirely sure what you are saying here. Unless you plan to run it as a monopropellant you will need an oxidizer. Also I don't think @KSPNewbie intends to fly this system beyond the lower atmosphere if they intend to fly it at all.

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

I have a bottle of kMnO4 in my garage. Unlike hydrogen peroxide permangate is pH sensitive, so if you can keep the pH up until reaction time you canbrelatively deaden its reaction. I used to make batteries of the using sea water for quality testing. 

Neat, I'd love to hear more.

[PB666]

7 minutes ago, A Fuzzy Velociraptor said:

Im not entirely sure what you are saying here. Unless you plan to run it as a monopropellant you will need an oxidizer. Also I don't think @KSPNewbie intends to fly this system beyond the lower atmosphere if they intend to fly it at all.

Neat, I'd love to hear more.

Its pretty well behaved as long as you keep the ph up, It looses oxygen the moment you treat it with acid, which makes it ideal to use with salt water. You can rescue a tank in the midst of a vibrio outbreak by simply creating a salt brdge between a saturated solution of MNO4, a small platinum electrode, and a multimeter. You can thus control the redox potential of the water using the multimeter and resistors.  You could use the permanganate dirrectly but the MnO2 precipitates. Right so the point, you can treat living organisms with it, and they might feel better. 

The issue of MnO4 is the weight, you get the equivilent of 1.25 O2 with th added weight of 1.5O a K and an Mn. Its crystalline at STP but you could mix it with a stable fuel and no catalyst, again you have to keep the pH up. You could potentially store it on a bed of calcium carbonate to maintain its buffering capacity. 

There are others of this type, a much stronger example is dichromate, its about the most powerful oxidant that i know of at low pH. Its also environmenatlly unfriendly as heck. 

If you want to do any testing with this you have to do it on a small scale, don't think you can mix 500 ml of organic with 500 g of KMnO4 (purple) and all may go well until boom. The rate of organic reactions rises 2 fold for every 10degrees c. So that at room temp it might take 10 minutes to rise 10c, 5 minutes for the next 10c 2 minutes 1 minutes, 30 seconds 15 seconds, 5, 2, critical boom. A small glass petri-dish with a few milligrams each, cover it with parafilm and leave it, a dirty brown residue means you have formed MnO2, meaning that its unstable at ambient. 

Once you show something is stable at small scales work to large scales using a temperature probe, if temperature begins to rise mix with a good dilute base and spread out. 

Dont repeat Texas City. 

[Matuchkin]

I have two important questions

1. How nice would it be to use H2O2+_____ as a fuel?

2. How simple is it to get potassium permanganate, and where can one get it?

[ulinedit]

On 5/30/2016 at 7:29 AM, Ravenchant said:

@PB666 @A Fuzzy Velociraptor Peroxide is not easy to handle from an objective point of view, but I suggested it because it was the first thing to come to mind and it's next to harmless in comparison with hydrazine mixtures and NTO. As for catalysts, Black Arrow got by with a silver plated nickel wire mesh for a 85% concentration.

 

Laughing gas/propane would be a much better choice, as you said, and easier to acquire.

Peroxide was an odd choice at first - but after I thought about it a little more - it actually makes sense.  The nickel wire mesh may be hard to get a hold of, seeing as how this is not something sold at the local hardware store.  You will need to visit a manufacturer to ask about this material (Try Belleville Wire - Nickel Wire Mesh ) they are the experts and should be able to help fulfill these requests.

 

Propane is an every day household item, but most people out there don't really how explosive an dangerous this stuff can be!  Always be very cautious when using propane and/or laughing gas!

[todofwar]

On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 2:11 PM, PB666 said:

Theres lots of things on the market that are really dangerous that you can buy. Doesn't account for sense or safety, I once ordered a can of hydrogen flouride, and UPS lost it somewhere. 

In my experience safety regs on chemicals are based more on how well known a chemical is vs how dangerous it is. Case in point: I was required to go through special training to handle 30% formaldehyde, but no training for HF or t-BuLi. 

[KSPNewbie]

Thanks everyone for assisting me in the article this past time. I've successfully designed a prototype engine using Gasoline and LOX that has a burn time of 12 seconds. I will be flying it eventually once I design a rocket shell. It would probably be controlled autonomously by my Arduino. Whish me good luck!
 

[NSEP]

On 29 november 2016 at 5:42 PM, KSPNewbie said:

Thanks everyone for assisting me in the article this past time. I've successfully designed a prototype engine using Gasoline and LOX that has a burn time of 12 seconds. I will be flying it eventually once I design a rocket shell. It would probably be controlled autonomously by my Arduino. Whish me good luck!
 

Do you have any info, drawings or anything? I and maybe others would like to see that.

[totalitor]

Indeed, me too. Would be interesting.