Hybrid Rocket Fuel
| Who |
Arif Karabeyogla |
| Title |
research associate, aeronautics and astronautics |
| Affiliation |
Stanford University |
| Question |
What is regression rate? |
| Length |
33 SECONDS |
| Transcript |
“Regression rate is the rate that your solids material burns. So, it’s essentially the burning rate of the solid fuel. The reason it’s important is you need a certain amount of real mass generation to produce your thrust. So, that has to be a certain value to generate the required thrust for a given mission. And high regression rate becomes critical for applications such as Space Shuttle which the thrust requirements are significantly large.” |
| Date |
9/19/92 |
| Question |
What is the history of hybrid rocketry? |
| Length |
54 SECONDS |
| Transcript |
“The history of the hybrid rocketry is pretty old. It goes back to 50 years of so. But this particular fuel idea came to us like six, seven – five years ago, I guess. And the whole thing started with some experiments performed by the Air Force. And they burned what they called solidified hybrid rockets, and they observed those high performance, high regression rates that they couldn’t explain. And we developed a theory to explain those high regression rates. And using that theory, we came across a class of propellants, paraffin waxes, that would burn equally fast and make hybrids viable for large applications.” |
| Date |
9/19/92 |
| Question |
How did you decide paraffin would be a good rocket fuel? |
| Length |
18 SECONDS |
| Transcript |
“Once you know the physics, it’s easy to determine what materials would burn fast, and that’s what we exactly did, and luckily the first material we have examined was the paraffin waxes. And it worked like a charm. We got lucky there.” |
| Date |
9/19/92 |
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