View Single Post
  #3  
Old 06-30-2019, 02:23 AM
blackshire's Avatar
blackshire blackshire is offline
Master Modeler
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by tbzep
My first though when reading this was "bat $#it crazy rocket propellant"! After reading about it, sure enough, it was first synthesized from Peruvian bat crap!
Yep--it put the "guano" in the "guanidine!" Also:

I have never flown a Jetex (or Jet-X) model jet (thanks to the USPS folks in Anchorage, who let my order of Jet-X fuel pellets and two Jet-X motors [ordered from Davis Diesel years ago] get covered with snow out on the runway, then didn't brush the snow off after bringing the cart indoors, resulting in the fuel pellets getting soaked...), but I did try burning one of the dried-but-crumbled fuel pellets (in a washed pot pie pan) in the kitchen of my old house down the street. It produced a lot of bluish smoke, which definitely smelled of guano (think mouse, rat, gerbil, or hamster "residue"), mixed with an ammonia-like odor. (From what I have read, Jetex and Jet-X motors, in which the fuel pellets burn under pressure [having just a pinhole-like jet orifice], produce relatively little smoke, which just has an ammonia-like smell, although not intense enough to be irritating or noxious. But:

The "green" monopropellant that the Electron's Curie kick stage uses is--judging by the four spherical pressure vessels directly ahead of the Curie rocket engine--a liquid organic nitrate, and possibly even a gel-type organic nitrate. While the monopropellant is probably a chemical relative of guanidine nitrate (it's actually guanidinium nitrate, but most people use the shorter name, just as people mean "dinitrogen tetroxide" when they refer to "nitrogen tetroxide"), that doesn't mean that it's made from some kind of animal (Kiwi or Emu? :-) ) guano, as such organic chemicals are easily synthesized (in high school chemistry class, we made apple juice in laboratory glassware, and urea is also easily synthesized from reagents). I would love to be able to build and fly (if I could get another flying field, but others don't have that problem) such liquid propellant model rockets, especially scale models.
__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR
Reply With Quote