FU Money + Meets the (Next Big) Thing

[Wayne E Baisley]

> Are those TitaniumAlumina (Ti 1 Al 3 ) blades?  I believe they get
> stronger as they are heated up.

I really don't remember for sure, and haven't been able to Google up
anything definitive.  I did manage to dig up a cool old brochure on the
SSME Hot Gas Manifold Computational Fluid Dynamics Analysis.  Brings
back memories ...

I can remember some of the CFD guys talking about their model's having
about 150,000 degrees of freedom, plus more than 30 species of
chemistry.  Rockwell acquired *2* Crays back in those days (YMPs, I
think), and one of the reasons (and you're getting this info no worse
than 8th-hand ;-) was that black projects kept submitting Cray jobs.  It
would take an hour or 2 to scrub the machine, the black job would run
for a couple of minutes, and then they'd scrub it for another hour or
two.  That really torqued the Rocketdyne folks who could otherwise keep
the machine busy for weeks on end.

The temperature inside the SSME combustion chamber is hot enough to boil
iron.  Other trivia at ...

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/propul/SSMEamaz.html

Cheers,
Wayne

"I know th'MAMBO!!  I have a TWO-TONE CHEMISTRY SET!!"  Zippy the PhD