If your propellants flow into the chamber and ignite immediately, you’re in business. But if they flow in, collect in a puddle, and then ignite, you have an explosion which generally demolishes the engine and its immediate surroundings. The accepted euphemism for this sequence of events is a “hard start.”
John D. Clark
1972
I G N I T I O N !: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
[As I told Barb after she asked me why I was laughing, “The research of rocket propellants was a risky business. Sometimes the author doesn’t treat the subject entirely seriously.”—Joe]
I need to find a copy of that – I like the reference to CITF being hypergolic with a number of substances, including test engineers!
This is a very funny book if you have a bit of a geeky side.
Last night I read about the smells of some of the things they tested. QOTD in the queue for 4/7/2017 in regards to that.
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
There are others.
Ignition! for me is always linked to me with this website http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time part of his wonderful series of post on “Things I Won’t Work With”
Hard copies are selling for four figures but PDF files are available. Wonder if there is anyone left to authorize a reprint. This is one of the funniest chemistry books I’ve ever read.
A PDF of Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, is located here.
http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Great Read!!!
The scan looks corrupted.
I found this book via Derek Lowe’s blog “In the pipeline” which has a wonderful category “Things I won’t work with”. Lowe is a research chemist (pharma, I think). He writes wonderfully entertainingly about colleagues who work on nasty things. Stuff like chlorine trifluoride: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time — where he refers to the book “Ignition” because that substance was investigated as a hypergolic rocket propellant and is discussed at some length in that book. He also mentions an accident from that research, involving a spill of a ton (!!!) of the stuff. From “Ignition” he cites that comment about test engineers:
Not all of Lowe’s articles are about unstable compounds, though a fair number are. Another one, even nastier than ClF3, is O2F2, often “evocatively” rendered as FOOF. A non-explosive example is selenophenol (http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/05/15/things_i_wont_work_with_selenophenol) in which he nicely covers the way some old time chemists would investigate the smell of the things they were making. Yikes.
In my mind Ignition! is always link to the series of blog posts “Things I Won’t Work With” starting with http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time
In sport rocketry this is referred to as a CATO or Catastrophe At Take Off
Look, at my age, my propellants don’t always flow into the chamber and ignite immediately.
This scan seems to be of much better quality: https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612
Thanks. I’m nearly finished with it.
Lots of good stuff in there. Another quote: ‘…the engine is likely to undergo what the British, with precision, call “catastrophic self-disassembly.”’
He discusses at length the search for new fuels and oxidizers of various categories. One of the weirdest mentioned is butyl mercaptan — better known to former organic chemistry students as “the active ingredient of skunks”. Then for the other extreme, he mentions attempts to use lemon oil as a fuel.