I do know that there's been a lot of bitching from engineers about Elon's insistence on reusability at every stage greatly complicating the design and manufacture of the engines. Making a turbopump 99.9% reliable for 50 firings is no small deal. Since that many uses, as opposed to a test fire or two, is a new thing, I'm sure the type and level of inspection and refurbishment is still to be determined to a large extent, since they can't reproduce a lot of flight conditions on the test stand. Things like soot buildup can be handled by prevention, cleaning or tolerance. Or any or all of the above.
I apologize if this is already been talked about.Does anyone have any thoughts about what design elements are incorporated into the Merlin Engine to allow easy reusability? From what I know, rocket engines are precision engineered pieces of equipment that are treated carefully. This means that even after a test, the rocket engines will be examined carefully again. I think the F1 engine after a test fire was flushed out with a chemical to prevent soot buildup. What is it about the Merlin Engine that allows the engine to be kind of roughly handled? It seems like no special pre-cautions are taken with the engine after the pad static test fire. Didn't the SSME require it to be fully examined after each firing? The Merlin engine even after a brief fire after a pad abort, SpaceX had no problem with trying to re-cycle and try again for launch. The Merlin Engine jus seems fairly robust and has the ability to go through multiple firing cycles without any type of special treatment from what I have observed.
How do you prevent soot buildup in a rocket engine?
Shades of Paul Harvey. Great post Cambrianera.
From http://www.quarkweb.com/nqc/lib/speccoll/Schnitt/970515.htmlTRW lead engineer for rocket engines was Tom Mueller.
"Impinging Sheet"? Got a link to any docs on that?