4 ms·

I don't have any data for the F-1, but the typical high power rocket engines of these days had an explosive temperament that needed to be tamed on the test stan

I don't have any data for the F-1, but the typical high power rocket engines of these days had an explosive temperament that needed to be tamed on the test stands. I recall that the SSME had a tendency to self-disassemble vilently on its test stand due to turbo pump failures that took a long time to solve. Other rocket engines probably were very similar in that regard.

baobrien 8y ago
IIRC, the injector plate on the F1 had to go through quite a few iterations to keep the engine from exploding.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  and according to a documentary I watched, they never knew WHY it stopped exploding, just that they found a plate that made it not explode anymore. Von Braun: "So what was the problem?" Engineer: "dunno"
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Ignition! by John Clark mentions it, although I don't think he tells that anecdote. Just that they were going to look at fancier designs, but the showerhead (with baffles) worked just fine.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  There were serious problems with unstable combustion causing the motor to break up, that were fixed by putting baffles on the injector plate to divide up the volume, where the combustion started, into smaller independent regions [1]. Once it was running smoothly, the engineers were still concerned that it might be on the edge of instability, so they ran some tests in which a small explosive charge was detonated in the combustion chamber of a running motor, to check that it settled down to running smoothly afterwards. [1] http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector-baffles.html http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector-baffles.html
ThenAsNow 8y ago
At least as insidious to diagnose and overcome, if not more so, was the transient behavior of the engine components outside of even the turbopumps (e.g., valves, preburners, thrust chamber) and the high sensitivity to all the time-dependent characteristics. Robert Biggs, one of the fathers of the SSME, wrote a great book on it, most (all) of it posted online at: http://enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/ssme.shtml http://enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/ssme.shtml

baobrien 8y ago

IIRC, the injector plate on the F1 had to go through quite a few iterations to keep the engine from exploding.

gameswithgo 8y ago
and according to a documentary I watched, they never knew WHY it stopped exploding, just that they found a plate that made it not explode anymore. Von Braun: "So what was the problem?" Engineer: "dunno"
- mcguire 8y ago
  Ignition! by John Clark mentions it, although I don't think he tells that anecdote. Just that they were going to look at fancier designs, but the showerhead (with baffles) worked just fine.
mannykannot 8y ago
There were serious problems with unstable combustion causing the motor to break up, that were fixed by putting baffles on the injector plate to divide up the volume, where the combustion started, into smaller independent regions [1]. Once it was running smoothly, the engineers were still concerned that it might be on the edge of instability, so they ran some tests in which a small explosive charge was detonated in the combustion chamber of a running motor, to check that it settled down to running smoothly afterwards. [1] http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector-baffles.html http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector-baffles.html

ThenAsNow 8y ago

At least as insidious to diagnose and overcome, if not more so, was the transient behavior of the engine components outside of even the turbopumps (e.g., valves, preburners, thrust chamber) and the high sensitivity to all the time-dependent characteristics. Robert Biggs, one of the fathers of the SSME, wrote a great book on it, most (all) of it posted online at: http://enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/ssme.shtml http://enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/ssme.shtml