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Post by drnovikov on Nov 1, 2016 9:50:38 GMT
1. Lithium and other alkaline metals are very soft in real life. It should not be possible to make turbopumps of them.
2. One can cover an armor plate with diamond crystals, but making a diamond armor plate or a diamond turbopump is just not plausible.
3. Pumping fluorine should be possible only with certain materials. Magnesium is not one of them, and neither is carbon.
4. Borosilicate glass is an insulator, not a superconductor.
Let's add more mpossible properties and usages we find, so the developer could fix them easier.
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Post by qswitched on Nov 1, 2016 19:58:28 GMT
Thanks!
For #1, really soft materials will remain, but they should be very difficult to make a pump out of. Generally, you have to keep the pump very slow/weak to keep them from breaking.
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tuna
New Member
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Post by tuna on Nov 2, 2016 1:35:51 GMT
2. One can cover an armoe plate with diamond crystals, but making a diamond armor plate or a diamond turbopump is just not plausible. There is a CVD process of depositing diamond on a surface. You can buy 2mm thick diamond disks right now, and the only limiting factor in thickness is that the diamond only grows at a rate of ~1 micron per hour. |
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Post by drnovikov on Nov 2, 2016 6:39:13 GMT
There is a CVD process of depositing diamond on a surface. You can buy 2mm thick diamond disks right now, and the only limiting factor in thickness is that the diamond only grows at a rate of ~1 micron per hour. If I understand it correctly, it is still not a plate cut of a diamond monocrystal, but a surface covered with a lot of very small crystals. Or maybe a polycrystaline slab. In that case these products won't be as sturdy as monocrystals, and their properties will be very different than those of a regular diamond. I expect the bonds between crystals to be much much weaker than the covalent bonds within a monocrystal. |
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Post by drnovikov on Nov 2, 2016 6:51:06 GMT
Thanks! For #1, really soft materials will remain, but they should be very difficult to make a pump out of. Generally, you have to keep the pump very slow/weak to keep them from breaking. You are welcome! Thanks for the great game. The alkaline metals are so soft it would not be possible to make a pump of them. They are so soft you can cut them with a butter knife. Well, a frozen butter is much harder to cut than a piece of potassium. Even if you could make a huge, enormously bulky outer shell of potassium or lithium, it is impossible to make turbopump blades both thin and sturdy enough. The metal is so soft it would rupture under centrifugal forces. Please, take a look, this is how soft the metal is: This is how thin the turpobump blades are:  Also, alkaline metals are very chemically active. They would violently explode on contact with fluorine, and even traces of water in the fuel would erode them rather quickly. |
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Post by qswitched on Nov 2, 2016 20:43:33 GMT
Turbopump blade thickness (and shell thickness) is based on the tensile strengths of materials, so softer materials require thicker and thicker blades with slower and slower centrifugal speeds. So there is no lower limit to how soft of a material you can use, but as you'll find, soft turbopumps are very mediocre.
Reactive metals (like lithium, etc.) are plated with nonreactive materials to prevent violent reactions. Admittedly though, this isn't a long term solution due to wear and tear.
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