
F-1 Thrust Chamber - spking
http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-thrust-chamber.html
======
Iv
A similar design (the space shuttle main engine) brought me some peace of mind
at work one day.

Nowadays, I do deep learning for a living, before that I was doing computer
vision. One day I am really pissed off at some compiling issue, with a
parallel code and I am like "fuck this, this is a plumbing issue! I should
spend my time on algorithms and shit. Not on ordering the damn bytes of the
raw pixels. I have done that for years, that should be a solved problem by
now."

I go on reddit for some well-deserved outrage-slacking and stumble on the
shuttle engine. "Yeah, that's what I am talking about. Now that is
engineering." Then I realized it is basically a maze of pipes and pumps.

Uh, yeah, 95% of plumbing (and some metallurgy feats as well). Ok, back to
coding my data pipelines then...

~~~
mrec
_" Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up"_ \-- John Carmack

~~~
00N8
"All engineering is plumbing - some fields just manage to avoid working on
broken sinks & toilets" -anonymous

~~~
mrec
Even the arts aren't necessarily safe. A story told by the composer Philip
Glass in 2011:

> _While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert
> Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But
> you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was
> installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you
> are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I
> was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me
> finish._

~~~
bazooka2th
My day job is plumbing. I really very badly want to be able to make a decent
living through the skills I've been practicing outside of my job, and this
quote is motivating to me. Thank you! :)

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iClaudiusX
Here is 500 fps film of the Saturn V launch for Apollo 11, narrated by Mark
Gray. It explains the sequence of events over the course of 8+ minutes (30
seconds real time).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKtVpvzUF1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKtVpvzUF1Y)

~~~
mywacaday
Thanks for that, great video that led me to this,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImoQqNyRL8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImoQqNyRL8Y),
sound recording organised by Dustin from SmarterEveryDay of the latest SpaceX
launch, the sonic booms of the boosters coming into land are amazing, listen
with headphones!

~~~
mikejb
Just as a Side-note: that video is from the Falcon Heavy demo launch last
year.

The recent launch was the first commercial Falcon Heavy launch (Arabsat 6a)

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Todd
I had a chance to see an F-1 at the Destination Moon exhibit which just opened
at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. It is astonishingly large. If you're in
the area, or near one of the other (few) locations where they are on display,
I would definitely recommend going.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#Locations_of_F-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#Locations_of_F-1_engines)

(The Apollo 11 command module is there, too!)

~~~
mikejb
> The Apollo 11 command module is there, too

Temporarily though. Normally it's exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington
DC (Which is also absolutely worth a visit).

~~~
marvin
This is excellent information. I'm headed to Seattle from Norway in May, and
will definitely take the opportunity to check this out :D

~~~
mcguire
If anyone's near Huntsville, AL, the Space and Rocket Center has stacks of
stuff for your gawking pleasure. Although I think the only F-1 you can go up
and rub on is outside the MSFC main building, which you wouldn't get to unless
you take a MSFC tour.

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WalterBright
Using the fuel to both cool the nozzle and pre-heat the fuel is just genius.
(The method first appeared on the V2.)

~~~
benj111
Concorde used fuel as a coolant also, not to cool the jet nozzle, but
ancillary things.

[http://www.concordesst.com/fuelsys.html](http://www.concordesst.com/fuelsys.html)

~~~
lultimouomo
The SR-71 used it to cool its skin and keep it around 300°C during Mach-3
flight. It also used it to cool its engines.

~~~
benj111
Isn't it also the SR-71 that has to expand to become fuel tight, and so leaks
fuel all over the runway at takeoff.

~~~
enriquto
I wonder how do this kind of crazy engineering ideas happen. What is gained by
_not_ making the thing fuel tight unconditionally? Leaking fuel at takeoff
sounds extremely dangerous!

~~~
sitharus
It also helps that the SR-71 fuel was almost impossible to ignite. It couldn’t
be spark ignited, instead they used triethylborane, an pyrophoric liquid that
burns in contact with air. It’s also used to ignite rocket engines as its
reactive enough to burn on contact with liquid oxygen.

~~~
benj111
"almost impossible to ignite" .... "pyrophoric liquid that burns in contact
with air"

Those seem mutually exclusive?

Do you mean that triethylborane ignites the fuel?

~~~
benj111
I don't know why I'm getting down votes for this, its a reasonable question.

To answer my own question triethylborane is indeed used to ignite the main
fuel.

[https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Triethylborane-used-as-a-
start...](https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Triethylborane-used-as-a-starter-fuel-
for-the-SR-71-Blackbirds)

~~~
refurb
You’re getting downvoted because you’re calling out an inconsistency that
doesn’t exist. The fuel that doesn’t burn is separate from the pyrophoroc
stuff used to start it.

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ncmncm
I am finding it astonishing that they could construct them at all, never mind
get them to work and not explode.

There is a great deal of this in modern life that we successfully ignore until
management failure makes it unmaintainable any more.

~~~
gmueckl
I don't have any data for the F-1, but the typical high power rocket engines
of these days had an explosive temperament that needed to be tamed on the test
stands. I recall that the SSME had a tendency to self-disassemble vilently on
its test stand due to turbo pump failures that took a long time to solve.
Other rocket engines probably were very similar in that regard.

~~~
baobrien
IIRC, the injector plate on the F1 had to go through quite a few iterations to
keep the engine from exploding.

~~~
gameswithgo
and according to a documentary I watched, they never knew WHY it stopped
exploding, just that they found a plate that made it not explode anymore.

Von Braun: "So what was the problem?" Engineer: "dunno"

~~~
mcguire
_Ignition!_ by John Clark mentions it, although I don't think he tells that
anecdote. Just that they were going to look at fancier designs, but the
showerhead (with baffles) worked just fine.

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sandworm101
What I find most amazing about these engines isn't the complexity but rather
that they operated successfully despite multiple errors. We are often told
that a single failure will destroy the craft, but that really wasn't the case.
Shuttle make it to orbit with multiple cracked tubes in one engine. Some bits
from the recovered F-1s show clear manufacturing errors. Building something
that will work at these energy levels is hard, but creating something that can
survive multiple random failures and still keep ticking is spectacular.

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boyd
The performance and track record of these engines is even more impressive when
you realize that all of the design and modeling work was largely done by hand!

This is perhaps apocryphal, but I briefly worked with a guy who’d worked on
the F-1 engine, and he said they’d use surplus WW2 grenades to simulate
distortions/aberrations in the combustion chamber.

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mcguire
Wrapping the turbine exhaust around the fuel return manifold would seem to be
counter-productive---exhaust gasses would heat the fuel, reducing its cooling
efficiency as it returns to the top of the engine.

...Unless the fuel at that point was already hotter than the turbine
exhaust...

Rocket engines are weird.

~~~
DuskStar
The turbine exhaust forms a barrier between the uncooled portion of the nozzle
and the chamber exhaust, which is significantly hotter. It's not colder than
the unburned fuel being used for regenerative cooling, but the bottom of the
nozzle isn't regeneratively cooled anyways.

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avmich
This engine is still outstanding - after all these years - for the thrust per
single chamber it achieves. May be only the RD-270 approached similar value
for the parameter. Which is not the most important parameter, but not an
insignificant one as well.

