Author Topic: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket  (Read 15123 times)

Offline iamlucky13

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Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« on: 06/18/2009 06:26 am »
I just stumbled across this on accident. The idea was to use monoatomic hydrogen and preventing the formation of diatomic hydrogen (H2) until its in the combustion chamber. Obviously stability would be a huge concern, as even a very small amount of warming would allow that reaction to spontaneously occur. I'm not clear, but it sounds like a very high ISP would be the result.

http://www.space.com/news/hydrogen_helium.html

I'm having trouble finding more info, or even what the name of the project was. It seems the research was done at Glenn, is probably now ended, and Bryan Palaszewski was the PI:

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/combustion/xPalaszewski.htm

Anybody else familiar with this?

Other frequent visitors of the Advanced Concepts forum, especially the aluminum ISRU rocket thread may find it interesting to note that the same guy was involved in research on gelled metallic fuels, including aluminum-based fuels.

Offline GI-Thruster

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #1 on: 06/18/2009 03:46 pm »
You can find a pair of posts from me on this on 3/12 and 3/13 here:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=15798.30

Looks like oyu need to pay for the paper if you want it. 

Offline Lampyridae

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #2 on: 06/19/2009 06:22 am »
I've read papers on monatomic hydrogen fuel. Basically, the problem is they are so unstable even very small amounts blow the combustion chamber to pieces.

Offline GI-Thruster

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #3 on: 06/19/2009 04:13 pm »
There are other problems.  You need an enormous diamond press just to create very small bits of the stuff, then you need to keep it in cold storage or it goes off like a bomb.  Doesn't need oxidizer and the only way to keep a meta-stable atom stable is temp control.

Doesn't seem practical to me but then again, the notion of using propellants at all doesn't seem practical to me.  :-)

Offline Proponent

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #4 on: 06/19/2009 06:01 pm »
There are other problems.  You need an enormous diamond press just to create very small bits of the stuff, then you need to keep it in cold storage or it goes off like a bomb.

I believe you may be referring to metallic hydrogen, which is a different proposed technology.

EDIT: Corrected egregious spelling errors.
« Last Edit: 06/20/2009 08:38 am by Proponent »

Offline GI-Thruster

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #5 on: 06/19/2009 07:06 pm »
You're right!  I was on another subject.  Ooops.

Offline iamlucky13

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #6 on: 06/20/2009 11:55 pm »
I've read papers on monatomic hydrogen fuel. Basically, the problem is they are so unstable even very small amounts blow the combustion chamber to pieces.

Right...I figured they probably left it at a dead-end for stability after working out the fundamentals of mono-atomic hydrogen fuel.

I'm not sure this is actually different from the metallic hydrogen fuel GI-Thruster referenced. The Space.com article doesn't really give enough details.

Offline Lampyridae

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #7 on: 06/21/2009 01:19 am »
There are some such as metastable helium that are also highly dangerous. I believe they use lasers to get the atoms into an almost-stable molecular state. All of these monopropellants are subject to boom.

Tetraoxygen or red oxygen may have more promise as a (slightly) higher Isp oxidiser, or some stable form of ozone.

Offline cordwainer

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #8 on: 12/30/2014 01:34 pm »
You could use a high pressure graphene sieve to dissociated diatomic hydrogen into monoatomic hydrogen thus allowing safe storage and then inject the resulting monoatomic hydrogen in the combustion chamber.

Offline nadreck

Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #9 on: 12/30/2014 08:00 pm »
Or you can produce monatomic hydrogen in a thermo electric means as an atomic hydrogen welder does, now you have hydrogen so hot that it can't be contained by material, however you can use magnetics and accelerate it further. In theory a hydrogen ion engine would have much higher exhaust velocity/ISP than Xenon or other working fluids considered for this, however you get much lower thrust for the same amount of input energy.

If for example you had a fusion reaction and you dumped hydrogen, or water, into a fusion thermal engine system, in theory you could have temperatures high enough that it disassociated the atoms in the molecules to create monatomic ions.  This engine could in theory give up some of its efficiency to generate power for ongoing operation and magnetic containment through MHD.
It is all well and good to quote those things that made it past your confirmation bias that other people wrote, but this is a discussion board damnit! Let us know what you think! And why!

Offline RanulfC

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #10 on: 12/30/2014 08:42 pm »
One example of the MITEE NTR was designed (on paper at any rate) to actually produced thermally disassocitated single-H that would recombine in the exhaust nozzle to increase thrust and ISP.

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline alang

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #11 on: 04/26/2020 09:51 am »
The links in the first post look like they are dead.

I wonder if there is any earlier reference than this wili article about atomic hydrogen welding apparently invented by Irving Langmuir maybe before 1930:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_hydrogen_welding

For fans of mid twentieth century science fiction, montatomic hydrogen is mentioned in Robert Heinlein's 1948 juvenile novel "Space Cadet".

Offline [email protected]

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #12 on: 11/27/2020 04:24 pm »
Magnetic spin-stabilization in a~ 7 to10 tesla field ( mri mags generate 3 tesla) should keep proton's spins aligned, preventing recombination
For decades I've wondered if such a spin-stabilized monatomic hydrogen gas could be made to lase by passing whatever photon is produced by H+H --->H2 ( I'm guessing in the uv range) through the energized cloud.

Offline Donosauro

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Re: Monoatomic hydrogen-fueled rocket
« Reply #13 on: 11/27/2020 05:18 pm »
I've read papers on monatomic hydrogen fuel. Basically, the problem is they are so unstable even very small amounts blow the combustion chamber to pieces.

Are you saying that actual tests were performed where monatomic hydrogen blew up combustion chambers? If so could you cite the papers where you read that?

The last substantive thing I remember reading about monatomic hydrogen, perhaps thirty years ago in Scientific American, said researchers had managed to produce and stabilize only a few tens of atoms of monatomic hydrogen at a time, IIRC. Off the top of my head, that would seem to be twenty or more orders of magnitude too little to perform even tiny experiments with actual rocket motors.

Oops! Just noticed that your post was quite a long time ago!

I'm fairly sure that "The Stabilization of Atomic Hydrogen," in the January, 1982, Scientific American, was the article I read: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-stabilization-of-atomic-hydroge/.
« Last Edit: 11/27/2020 05:40 pm by Donosauro »

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