This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Ladislav Nevery
\ Recent starships test no 4 was super exciting and breathtaking.
Especially reentry camera views showing plasma going green as heat tiles containing boron started being burned?
\
\ \ So how can we improve the weakest point the hinge and gaps around flaps exposed to what is literally plasma torch?
\ One crazy Idea I got is to pump inert Argon gas to spaces between tiles or to hinge gap itself for the most critical 10 minutes during reentry.
\ Why Argon? Argon Ionization threshold is 15.7596 eV. So, its ionized plasma will be in theory created around ship heat tiles way sooner thus pushing oxygen away from surface for majority of most critical 10 minute reentry.
\ It will also be way more stable as the gas/plasma composition flow and presence is in this case fully controlled by us .
How much is needed for half of starship surface?
\ 1cm layer for 600s is around 13 Liters * 3 ?= 40 to be on safe side.
You can fit 40L to 0.2 L standard 200 pressurized bottle which is actually very small.
\ Now imagine you got like 4 of those bottles behind tip for redundancy and then essentially 2 pipes with holes distributing pressurized Argon thru gaps around tiles all the way to flaps filling the huge gaps there as well.
\ But then it got me thinking…
\ Now that we have two pressurized sources of Argon for cooling both left and right side.
Hmm… Can we use Argon for both cooling, drag reduction and trust vectoring?
\
\ DARPA actually did a lot of simulations how to do exactly that in supersonic speeds
as it was obvious to them that at those speeds’ flaps are probably no longer the best idea.
\ The experiment, at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, actually pretty heavily simulated and tested an old idea developed by Russian researchers during the Cold War. They discovered that injecting a few ions into the flow around a high-speed craft can dramatically reduce the drag it experiences.
\
Also. How much drag and heat can in theory be reduced by this Argon plasma?
\ During Cold-War. The Ioffe group conducted an experiment where they propelled a steel sphere, about the size of a marble, at a speed of 1 km/s through a tube filled with low-pressure argon gas.
\ A section of the gas in the tube was ionized to form a plasma. The team captured footage of the shock wave surrounding the sphere both before and after it entered the plasma.
\ The shock wave seemed to stand twice as far from the sphere compared to its position in a regular gas resulting in a claimed substantial 30 per cent reduction in drag. And considering that aeronautical engineers typically grapple to reduce drag by mere fractions of a per cent, these results seem shocking.
\ So. Huge benefit could not only be potentially lower drag and heat thus better longevity and protection of heat tiles.
Just imagine all the weight and complex sources of potential failures that you remove from starship.
\ Will we then with lower drag slow down enough in time to land safely?
Can the potential to lower drag also be used to get to orbit with less fuel/weight? So many questions.
\ DARPA's new X-plane concept CRANE will remove these moving external control surfaces to reduce aerodynamic drag and increase fuel efficiency,
\
Quite a lot of time and money was actually already spent on simulations too.
https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2021/systems/Wed_Walan.pdf
\ I know it is all just another crazy Idea ;D. And I don’t pretend to be aerospace engineer. I just have crazy Ideas pretty much every week as I can’t find a job.
I sold house and run away from war in EU. Australia promised me way to citizenship with postgrad visa.
\ After half 2 year masters ai study done and spending 30k half of life’s savings. Australia said that “they actually lied” and that I should go home but now I am homeless. Plus Australia made sure, so nobody employs people without full work rights and that I don’t get them so 12 months no job and over 200 denied job applications. 3k left on account and nowhere to go. World has changed a lot.
\ All everybody sees is just what country I was born to. We live in weird world where generation of descendants of Immigrants in power is pretty much the most selfish generation ever. New generation can’t own anything anymore. Neither house or land. Plus denying Immigration chances for American or Australian Dream that were given to their grandfathers so easily.
\ But still. I just wonder what kind of crazy Ideas would see light of day If whole world collaborated on starship designs.
\ Will we become multiplanetary faster? Will we survive next pandemic ww3 or meteorite by being multiplanetary?
So, in a sense this is actually prelude to www.starship-designs.com that will be up soon.
This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Ladislav Nevery
Ladislav Nevery | Sciencx (2024-06-19T11:22:42+00:00) Supercavitating ‘Em Steered Starship: Redirecting Plasma Instead of Trying to Prevent It. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/06/19/supercavitating-em-steered-starship-redirecting-plasma-instead-of-trying-to-prevent-it/
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