Air Force, NASA fire off environmentally-friendly rocket
Aluminum powder and water ice make for pasty rocket fuel
By Layer 8 on Mon, 08/24/09 - 5:36pm.
NASA and Air Force said today they had successfully launched a 9ft rocket 1,300 feet into the sky powered by aluminum powder and water ice.
Aluminum powder and water ice, or ALICE, has the potential to replace some liquid or solid propellants and is being developed by Purdue University and Pennsylvania State University to possibly replace liquid or solid rocket propellants.
Aside from the environmental impact ALICE could be manufactured in distant places like the moon or Mars, instead of being transported to distant locations at high cost, researchers said.
Researchers said in a paper that aluminum-water combustion has been studied since the 1960s as a viable propellant for propulsion since the mixture's reaction liberates a large amount of energy during combustion as well as green exhaust products. Currently, propellants used for Earth to orbit and orbit-to-orbit missions are expensive. Thus, there is quite a need for new-generation propellants which can be used in the booster stage as well as possess characteristics which make them storable in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). ALICE reportedly has a toothpaste-like consistency, and is cooled to -30° C (-22° F) 24 hours before flight, researchers said.
The military in particular is looking greener fuel. Last year the Air force flew a B-1B aircraft at supersonic speed using an alternate fuel in a flight over the White Sands Missile Range in Texas and New Mexico. The fuel, a 50/50 blend of synthetic and petroleum gas, is being tested as part of an ongoing Air Force program to use a fuel produced in the US, the Air Force said.
While not rocket-related, NASA recently opened up the competition for its Green Flight Challenge which offers up to $1.5 million for an aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon.
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Green Rocket ?!?
I can't help myself to laugh seeing all the "green" named stuff going out. Yeah, most or them are less polutive than their fuel counterparts but no one take into account the production fuel efficiency. Water Ice and aluminium powder sounds all very green but what isn't is they way it's produced. Considering Aluminium take an awefull lot of energy, were is that energy coming from. From Nuclear Plant, Coal Power plant. What is the purpose of a green rocket when it poluted 5 times more for it's production. We gotta rethink not the way we do stuff but rethink our priorities and the plain purpose of our priorities...
oh dear...
you sir, are an idiot.
bjork
Iceland, ironically, is rich in geo-thermal energy, and could also become a major exporter of aluminum.
Also, what are the products of this reaction that would be spewed as an aerosol above the launch site?
Greener than any alternative
Making ANY rocket propellant (or any other energetic material) is going to consume energy. Before you grouse about aluminium, look at the manufacture of perchlorate, or of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
The products of this reaction are hydrogen, which will burn in the exhaust plume if you're within Earth's atmosphere, and aluminium oxide dust, which is ubiquitous already on Earth's surface and about as close to harmless as it's possible to get. It's bad for you to breathe a lot of it, just like any other dust, but as far as toxicity, it's on a par with the water that you started with.
Umm, last time I checked
Umm, last time I checked Aluminum exposure increases your risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases. If this rocket uses aluminum, then aluminum aerosols that it creates would poison living things.
The shuttle uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as its fuel for the SSME (space shuttle main engines). The only exhaust is tremendous heat and water vapor last time I checked, it doesn't get any greener than that.
Of course production and storage is expensive and wasteful
What happened to using liquid methane as a fuel? Methane is abundant all over the place and has even been detected on mars.
Here's a link to a recent
Here's a link to a recent paper about aluminum toxicity in neurons.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19075576?ordinalpos=6&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
Hey Anon, why don't you go and breathe that aluminum dust that you claim is harmless.
IONIC aluminum is not aluminum oxide!
Maybe it'll make me start talking to myself? :-)
The paper talks about metal ions, not the tightly-bound oxides that are the only conceivable product when you react aluminum with water and then shoot the superheated product stream into an oxygen-bearing atmosphere.
Please note that the paper also implicates ions of zinc, copper and iron. If you want to be really safe, you'd better go back to the stone age, and make sure you aren't near any mineral springs.
Correction
The reaction produces hydrogen and aluminum OXIDE dust. There is a difference between aluminum oxide and aluminum. The article linked to about aluminum toxicity says nothing about aluminum oxide. It talks about aluminum ions. Just because chlorine gas can kill you doesn't mean anything with that element in its molecular composition will (such as salt). Likewise, even if aluminum ions cause neural damage, that doesn't mean aluminum oxide dust will.
Environmentally-friendly? aluminum OXIDE dust!
Many people consider Aluminum Oxide as much worse cause of ozone depletion than CFC's. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41371/35332538.pdf?sequence=1
So...
Is the idea not to harm the planet while we blow stuff up? LOL! All this "green" stuff is getting a bit tiresome...