Specific Impulse of cyclic ozone?

Malcolm Street wrote in
:

Damon Hill wrote:

Liquid ozone has a notorious reputation for extreme and
explosive instability; I'm not sure how this 'cyclic'
ozone is supposed to be more stable, if it's going to be
useable at all.

Extremely dumb question:

would the cyclic physical format (isomer?), which I assume is an
equilateral triangle, make it more stable than a normal linear ozone
molecule?

That's what I was wondering about, too. Otherwise it would
hardly be worth the effort to attempt to synthesize, except
as an academic exercise.

Regular ozone's third oxygen atom apparently isn't strongly
bound and when it does come free, it gleefully recombines with
another oxygen atom with considerable energy release. Hence
the interest in monoatomic hydrogen as a propellant, at least
at a theoretical level. It's the practice that's the devil.

Be nice if this cyclic ozone worked out, though we have to make
a lot of assumptions about its actual usage. It would turn
Delta IV into something kick-ass, if it didn't blow up!

There was some DARPA interest in a hydrazine-like molecule that
as a monopropellant would have an Isp in the low 400s; haven't
heard anything about that in some time, so I gather no progress
was made. That would easily enable a SSTO with decent payload.

--Damon

Rick Jones wrote:

Henry Spencer wrote:
Considering that regular ozone is not used as an oxidizer because it
is a powerful and touchy explosive, I don't even want to *think*
about a version packing twice as much energy...

A peanut gallery question - would it be more touchy than antimatter?

No, though close. "Antimatter" and "touchy", together, kinda spells B-O-O-M
better than anything else.

BTW, what's a peanut gallery question?

Anyway, what about cyclic O4? Should be far more stable, and cyclic O5
should be a little better, the bond angles are far more natural.

New allotropes are always fun. But not always real.


--
Peter Fairbrother

Peter Fairbrother writes:

BTW, what's a peanut gallery question?

He was poking a little bit of fun at his own expense.

There was a very popular US children's TV show in the 1950s called
"Howdy Doody." The studio audience (children, of course) was called
the Peanut Gallery. So a question from the Peanut Gallery is
uninformed or naive.
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer

In article ,
Rick Jones wrote:
Considering that regular ozone is not used as an oxidizer because it
is a powerful and touchy explosive, I don't even want to *think*
about a version packing twice as much energy...

A peanut gallery question - would it be more touchy than antimatter?

Antimatter is not touchy at all, provided you keep it confined properly.
It's dangerous, yes, but in a predictable way that can be dealt with by
careful engineering. The problem with sensitive explosives, like liquid
ozone, is that they're so unpredictable -- they don't give you any way to
improve the situation.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
There was a very popular US children's TV show in the 1950s called
"Howdy Doody." The studio audience (children, of course) was called
the Peanut Gallery. So a question from the Peanut Gallery is
uninformed or naive.

The term "Peanut Gallery" is much older than Howdy Doody.
The "Peanut Gallery" originally meant the cheap seats in
the nose bleed section far from the stage/field. Since
these are the cheap seats this is most often where you
find the hecklers, such as those that might throw peanuts,
thus the name. A comment from the Peanut Gallery is akin
to heckling or otherwise irreverent commentary.

Rick Jones wrote:
A peanut gallery question - would it be more touchy than antimatter?

On 2/5/05 2:39 PM, Henry Spencer replied:
Antimatter is not touchy at all, provided you keep it confined
properly.

Since the amount of antimatter that has *ever* been confined is a
number of atoms small enough to be countable, I don't see how Henry has
any engineering data to suggest that antimatter is not touchy if
confined properly.

Unless he defines "confined properly" as meaning "confined in such a
way as to make it not touchy," in which case the statement is a
tautology and has no actual meaning.

--
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis

On 2/4/05 1:22 AM, John Schilling wrote:
Might this be the Holy Grail, the propellant that fits all nine DOT/UN
hazard categories simultaneously?

Probably not a carcinogen

--
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis

Christopher M. Jones wrote:
Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
There was a very popular US children's TV show in the 1950s called
"Howdy Doody." The studio audience (children, of course) was called
the Peanut Gallery. So a question from the Peanut Gallery is
uninformed or naive.

The term "Peanut Gallery" is much older than Howdy Doody. The
"Peanut Gallery" originally meant the cheap seats in the nose bleed
section far from the stage/field. Since these are the cheap seats
this is most often where you find the hecklers, such as those that
might throw peanuts, thus the name. A comment from the Peanut
Gallery is akin to heckling or otherwise irreverent commentary.

Be that as it may, I was thinking of myself as uninformed or naieve
rather than irreverant - at least in this context

rick jones
--
firebug n, the idiot who tosses a lit cigarette out his car window
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway...
feel free to post, OR email to raj in cup.hp.com but NOT BOTH...

"Geoffrey A. Landis" writes:

On 2/4/05 1:22 AM, John Schilling wrote:
Might this be the Holy Grail, the propellant that fits all nine DOT/UN
hazard categories simultaneously?

Probably not a carcinogen


Yes, but carcinogens aren't singled out under the DOT/UN scheme, just
lumped in with all the other 6.1 poisons and toxins IIRC. Or possibly
in class 9 "miscellaneous". I'd wager cyclic ozone is toxic, and we
can surely find some miscellaneous hazard associated with it as well
(reading the MSDS induces gibbering Lovecraftian insanity?), so it
doesn't specifically need to be carcinogenic to touch those bases.

The hard one is going to be the class 2/3/4 trifecta, with 2 being
"hazardous gasses", 3 being "flammable liquids", and 4 "flammable
solids". Seems right out, unless we store the stuff at its triple
point. But, a loophole. Class 2 includes "liquified gasses", and
does not explicitly preclude a liquified flammable gas from being
also classed as a "flammable liquid". And class 4.2 is reserved
for pyprophoric materials, 4.3 I believe for materials reactive with
water, or possibly I got them backwards. In any event, per the guy
who taught the class that includes *all* pyrophoric or water-reactive
substances, regardless of physical state.

So, if cyclic ozone spontaneously gets it on with air or water, we
may have our winner. Anyone got a sample to test?


--
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*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
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Since the amount of antimatter that has *ever* been confined is a
number of atoms small enough to be countable,

Depends on what "antimatter" means to you. If you count only atoms, that
seems likely to be true. To a physicist, antimatter means any form of it,
including antielectrons and antiprotons. I don't believe DESY, LEP, SLAC,
Fermilab and so on have managed to count their amount of antimatter if
defined this way.

Jan