My intro to liquid rockets

thanks for the input. And yeah, you are probably right about the combustion. I think hydrazine reacts much more quickly took, and there is almost no ignition delay.

Nile Red

oh you mean like a shot into the nozzle? That could be interesting

Nile Red

I think your aniline is not completely combusting, evidenced by all the sooty residue. Completely burning aromatics and unsaturated hydrocarbons requires 2 oxygen atoms for each carbon, but 1/2 O per hydrogen. Nitrogen gas is extremely stable, much more so than nitrogen oxides (which are oxidizers, so the reaction N->NOx is backwards). Therefore all N atoms are released as N2 gas, no O required. Completely oxidizing aniline, C6H7N, requires 12 O atoms to make CO2 from carbon, 3-1/2 O to make H2O from 7 hydrogens and no O for the nitrogen, which serves to remove some of the heat to make hot expanding N2 . That's 15-1/2 oxygen atoms for every molecule of aniline, or the oxygen from more than 5 nitric acid molecules. You'll notice that hydrazine has NO carbons and only the 4 hydrogens burn, so only 2 oxygen atoms are needed to completely burn one hydrazine molecule. I believe that early in the 20th C. the Germans tried aniline as a fuel (maybe from all those dye manufacturers), but settled on alcohols instead. Ideally, the fuel would be pure hydrogen, which is indeed how fuels were eventually used, once we figured out how to make high-volume pumps for stuff at near 0 Kelvin temperatures. Hydrazine has got to be the next best thing after hydrogen, though it is very nasty stuff. Read "Command and Control" ( or see the movie, on YT I believe) for a tale of what happens to hydrazines and dinitrogen tetroxide when they mix inside a silo with an armed nuclear missile in it. Whoopee.

mrkhrdr@gmail.com

Ill look into it!

Nile Red

Yeah, i dont really plan to explore non-hypergolics much. Unless i can get access to an official facility of some sort.

Nile Red

I plan to setup some sort of remote thing. Cause, the next mixtures are not as forgiving and go off much more violently. Will most likely shatter the glass.

Nile Red

yup

Nile Red

I plan to measure force somehow in the future

Nile Red

Thanks for the input!

Nile Red

Nile: If you also want to film the nozzle of your rocket, might i suggest you place a mirror at a 45° angle within the frame above the nozzle. That way the camera keeps out of harms way, and you wont have to fiddle around in editing with syncronizing multiple cameras. This could also work great for some of the time lapse videos you do.

Rene Schickbauer

Nile: Maybe you should rig up a simple thing with an RC servo and an Arduino with a button on a long cable. That would allow you to a) keep a nice safe distance to the test setup and b) have a repeatable injection of the second fluid (both in direction as well as in speed).

Rene Schickbauer

Nile: Great videos! I'd love to see some videos about lithography and etching in the future. I'm interested in DIY PCB fab, and I'm curious what is possible to DIY as an amatuer/hobbyist chemist. I know NR has done a few vids on this topic (he covered electro?-chemical tinning and maybe one or two other topics) I'm curious if you can make your own photo-resist and etchant. Also, I wonder if there's a way for DIYers to create solder masks on their PCBs. Other cool topics could be etching glass (so long as you don't have to use HF) or more printing/cyanotyping/dying stuff. Anyway, you rock, keep making awesome content!

Zaak Beekman

that is why I recommended acrylic combustion chambers, they are really only good for testing fuels in small scale for a few seconds. After he tested most accessible mixtures, he can move on to different parts of chemistry.

Adam Rak

Let's not get Nile hooked on rocketry, there's too many chemistry reactions in the universe to explore.

Brian Reddeman

Can you put my name as finn kamprad instead of finn Austin please?

You should snap the end off your pipettes to squirt quicker :)

Hi there! This has definitely been one of my favorite of your videos. I wonder if in your future experiments it would be possible to attach a force meter to the tube in some way (maybe put the whole setup on a scale and tare it?) so that we can see the differences in thrust between runs. It would be interesting to see the differences between straight tubes and nozzles, and different fuel/oxidizer mixtures.

<a href="https://i.imgur.com/QXZ2bHr.jpg?1" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i.imgur.com/QXZ2bHr.jpg?1</a> Here is a super simple roughly sketched out rig that is self contained and would work. It uses a compressed gas to push onto a plunger, that forces the fuel out of their tanks and into the combustion chamber. it's not the best set up, but it's about as simple and cheap as i'd say you can get without making it too unsafe. Now that said you can forgo the one way valves and just have ones that are on or off, based on when you want to fire, but one ways i feel might help control the flow a bit better when going up against the chamber pressure. Also the plungers you don't really need, since what ever compressed gas you use will just push the liquid out anyways. But i have it there to help keep things a bit more stable and keep the force a bit more uniform. Though that can be gotten around by putting a few rods in the fuel tanks to keep the fuel more stable and thus splash around less. So this can be done cheaper and made simpler as well. But i'm sure some people here can toss you a design/s that are more than a rough sketch and usable. After all it's clear you aren't out to make a rocket bigger than your normal model rocket. So you shouldn't have much trouble keeping this cost effective, since the scale you're working at is full stuff that will do the job. And the only thing that will cost a bit is the nozzle, unless we just want usable and not super efficient. All in all, if you want advise just make a post asking for designs, parts, and such. Since i'm sure a good number of people here will jump on board and offer help.

non-hypergolic fuels tend to be less toxic (because they are less reactive at lower temps), but they have the occasional issue "hard start", when the ignition starts a bit later then is should and the rocket explodes because of too much mixture in the ignition chamber. I think that you should not even consider non-hypergolic fuels without a specialized building and equipment to handle the probable explosions. So staying with hypergolic seems to be the right choice. Eventually you will need fuel pumps to inject the fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber, or pressurize them with nitrogen. You can make quite serious rockets by using only pressure fed system, and it is quite simple to implement and control. I recommend thick acrylic combustion chambers because they are easily to machine and also transparent. Acrylic will melt and interfere with combustion (as a fuel) too, which is a big minus, but may be good enough for a few seconds of experimentation. Acrylic can be also reused a few times, you just need to drill out the blackened inside (unless you burned it beyond repair).

Adam Rak

That's a good question; rocket fuels like this should be using just their own oxidizer but an inefficient combustion chamber and mixture ratio could be using outside air as well. Wonder if that is impacting Nile's dud ratio...

Brian Reddeman

No air needed. It works in outer space too. :)

Silviu T

Does the mixture sucks air(O2) from outside in it's base? Or does the ignition only use the oxydyser?

Jean Pierre Daviau

And please, please, please. Be very careful with hydrazine. I am sure we all want you alive.

Someone is going to get demonetized :) Good work, keep going!

Super cool. I loved "Ignition", and it's great to see some physical demos of the science. Regarding finding fuels: if you make your own I know I'd be really interested in a video on the preparation and safe handling of Hydrazine (or other hypergolic fuels), but maybe that's too hot for YouTube :/

Branan Riley

I’m loving this idea as a series of videos. I’m really interested in hydrazine-based reactions! Thanks for the great content!

Joel

Hopefully nothing happens. I just feel like YouTube has been trigger happy with their strikes lately.

Very sweet indeed

Nile Red

Maybe ill do that. Im not really very worried about it though, because i dont think im encouraging people to try it.

Nile Red

Definitely will do more

Nile Red

Hey, just worried about YouTube flagging this. Maybe make that disclaimer at the beginning a few frames longer.

At least your being very careful have built a shield that very important.

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

This is some pretty sweet stuff, Chemistry + rocket science

Yeah, I really really like this Project. Aniline with conc nitric acid. Youtube can be such douches pulling down Cody lab projects and flash powder stuff. I hope if you do post this on youtube they don't decide to mark it as EM make. Again very cool video!!!

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

Excellent video, keep up the good work

Very cool! I'd love to see more!