4 ms·
IIRC, the injector plate on the F1 had to go through quite a few iterations to keep the engine from exploding.
by baobrien 7y ago
IIRC, the injector plate on the F1 had to go through quite a few iterations to keep the engine from exploding.
- gameswithgo 7y agoand 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 7y agoIgnition! 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 7y agoThere 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