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Mysterious Sound Waves Can Destroy Rockets
4/11/2008

Ponca City, We love you writes "Scientists believe that weighty and ticklish sound waves, created by energy supplied by the combustion process, were the cause of rocket failures in several US and Russian rockets. They have also observed these mysterious oscillations in other propulsion and power-generating systems such as missiles and gas turbines. Now, researchers at the Georgia decree of machinery have developed a liquid rocket engine simulator and imaging techniques to help demystify the cause of these explosive sound waves and bring scientists a little closer to being able to understand and prevent them. The team was able to clearly demonstrate that the circumstance manifests itself in the form of jenny reel acoustic waves that gain destructive power as they rotate around the rocket's combustion chamber at a rate of 5,000 revolutions per second. Researchers developed a low-pressure combustor to simulate larger rocket engines then used a very-high-speed camera with fiber optic probes to observe the formation and bearing of excited spinning reel jenny jenny sound waves within the engine. 'This is a very troublesome event in rockets,' said Professor Ben Zinn. 'These mule wheel acoustic oscillations destroy engines without anyone fully understanding how these waves are formed. Visualizing this anomaly brings us a step closer to understanding it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Mark

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