Propellant Progress..

It looks like we have secured another source of 50% peroxide.

The process of turning 50% food grade into 85–90% rocket grade is as follows:

1)Filter the peroxide through ion exchange resin to remove stabilizers.

2)Sparge from 50 to 70%

3)Sparge from 70 to 85%

Step 1 needs to be conducted with the bulk temperature below 70F or the resin tends to catch fire. The low temp at FAR is presently >70F with a high > 100. This leaves the bulk peroxide temperature too hot.  So we took a dewar of Lquid nitrogen out to the desert and cooled and then filtered about 1500lbs of peroxide. We cooled the ulk peroxide by bubblin Ln2 throu from the bottom. We started at 11PM and finished about 6:30 am just as ths sun was comming up. Everything worked exactly as desined and according to the TDS meter we removed the bulk of the stabilizers.  We got back home at about 11:30 am this morning. Its just after 6pm and I just woke up. This all nighter thing worked so much better 25 years ago in college.

We have about 30 minutes more work and we are ready to try step 2. We will proably do this next weekend. I can’t do the final step until the generator I ordered arrives. The 50 to 70% step can be done with filtered “desert” dry air, the 70 to 90 step needs the air to be dryer than that and our big oiless compressor and -100F due-point airdryer system needs more power than we presently have on site.