Specific Impulse of cyclic ozone?

Geoffrey wrote:
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.

It's quite trivial to show that (for example) the equilibrium vapour
pressure of material N at temperature M is O, and this will cause a heating
rate of P on the material, which the cooling system can cope with by a margin
of Q, and similarly that the containment can cope with the expected
accellerations and other peterubations.

In article .com,
Geoffrey wrote:
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.

The statement is necessarily a bit speculative :-), but I think there is
reasonable cause for making it, nevertheless. Antimatter gives trouble
only when it encounters normal matter. This is a greatly magnified
version of the potential trouble from mixing fuel and oxidizer in
bipropellant liquid rockets. The answer is the same: you keep them apart!

The engineering for doing this with antimatter is by no means "off the
shelf", but it doesn't look infeasible. The more fundamental point,
though, is that it *is* a matter of engineering. We have a handle on the
problem: just keep the two apart and nothing drastic *can* happen.

With a single-component chemical explosive like liquid ozone -- the
original topic, remember -- *there is no such handle*. That makes it a
fundamentally different problem, and a much more difficult one. There's
no engineering way of making such a material more docile, no systematic
way you can modify the situation to one in which unpleasantness is
reliably avoided.

Bipropellants, even exceedingly active ones like ClF5, can be kept apart;
sometimes it takes a lot of work and the safety margins remain limited,
but it's generally practical. Explosive materials can rarely be tamed,
and when it does happen, it's generally done by finding a way to modify
the material to a better-behaved one, not by stabilizing the original.

Much depends on details, but in a fundamental sense, handling antimatter
safely *is* easier than handling liquid ozone safely.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

On 2005-02-04, John Schilling wrote:
(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:
It goes on to state that while mundane ozone contains
about 1.5 volts in its molecular bonds, cyclic ozone
has about 3.0 volts...
Does anybody have any figures on the approximate
specific impulse of a hydrogen-cyclic ozone rocket?

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...

Oh, come now, of *course* you want to *think* about it. And I, at least,
want to *think* about making it entirely from Oxygen-14, for that extra
dose of insanity...

Or -15...

http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/ozone.html

Summary of the reaction:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...99d5be7e770f44

--
-Andrew Gray

(Henry Spencer) wrote in
:

Much depends on details, but in a fundamental sense, handling
antimatter safely *is* easier than handling liquid ozone safely.

Well, we can make liquid ozone in quantity sufficient to be
dangerous; it's a lot harder to make antimatter in any
quantity.

How the heck is liquid ozone generated, anyway? Cooling
in a bath of a colder cryogen? Mechanical refrigeration
seems right out from the start.

--Damon

Henry Spencer wrote:

Geoffrey Landis wrote:

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.

The statement is necessarily a bit speculative :-), but I think there is
reasonable cause for making it, nevertheless. Antimatter gives trouble
only when it encounters normal matter.


Sounds pretty "touchy" to me. It goes boom if you touch it. QED.



--
Peter Fairbrother

(Henry Spencer) wrote in :

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.


All the antimatter I've ever heard of has been created through high energy
physics. I'm assuming that this "High Energy" is still around when the
antimatter is finished being created.....like its a plasma or something.

If this is a case, you could more accurately compare containing antimatter
to safely containing a massive explosion that has already happened.
Although in the case on antimatter if this containment that is sutiable to
contain a massive explosion fails....then you'll have even more energy
being output.

Basically if you could put ozone in your antimatter container, you wouldn't
have to worry about it exploding, because the container would be plenty
enough to handle that...it just wouldn't be usable afterwards.

Tom

Tom Kent wrote:
(Henry Spencer) wrote in :

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.


All the antimatter I've ever heard of has been created through high energy
physics. I'm assuming that this "High Energy" is still around when the
antimatter is finished being created.....like its a plasma or something.

If this is a case, you could more accurately compare containing antimatter
to safely containing a massive explosion that has already happened.
Although in the case on antimatter if this containment that is sutiable to
contain a massive explosion fails....then you'll have even more energy
being output.

Not inherently.
There is nothing in the physics precluding (for example) the output
being a little ball of anti-lithium.
The practicalities are nasty of course.

All the antimatter I've ever heard of has been created through high energy
physics. I'm assuming that this "High Energy" is still around when the
antimatter is finished being created.....like its a plasma or something.

Well, the energy is fairly low - around 1 GeV, the weight of an (anti-)
proton, is the largest you need. Of course, almost all antimatter so far
has been electrically charged particles - anybody made a large supply of
antineutrons? - so the plasma definitely applies. OTOH, LEAR (low energy
antiproton ring) cools its particles quite significantly, to fractions of
a Kelvin IIRC.

Jan

In article ,
Damon Hill wrote:
How the heck is liquid ozone generated, anyway? Cooling
in a bath of a colder cryogen? Mechanical refrigeration
seems right out from the start.

Cooling with liquid nitrogen seems the obvious approach. Ozone has a much
higher boiling point than normal oxygen, so it's easier to liquefy.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

In article 4,
Tom Kent wrote:
All the antimatter I've ever heard of has been created through high energy
physics. I'm assuming that this "High Energy" is still around when the
antimatter is finished being created.....like its a plasma or something.

No, there are techniques for cooling antiprotons, which are routinely
applied by the accelerator guys to keep the stuff around longer. Usually
they don't cool it all the way down to zero, but there's no fundamental
obstacle to doing so. (Last I heard, the one tricky part was thought to
be condensing the antihydrogen to a solid.)
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |