User:Marsdirt/Nitrous Oxide Fuel Blend

Nitrous Oxide Fuel Blend Monopropellants
Nitrous oxide may be blended with various fuels for use as high performance rocket monopropellants. There is a lot of interest in nitrous oxide fuel blends due to the high performance, less complex feed system architectures and non-toxic nature. However the use of nitrous oxide fuel blend rocket propellants should be limited to professional, commercial and government aerospace entities. In order to safely use nitrous oxide fuel blended monopropellants, sophisticated, proprietary anti flashback mechanisms are needed to ensure that a flash-back event does not back-propagate into a tank. An improperly designed feed system or thruster could lead to a flash-back event. The high-energy density of nitrous oxide with fuels ensures that an un-arrested flash-back into the storage/feed tank would be catastrophic.

NOFBX™
NOFBX™ is the trade name for a proprietary nitrous oxide/fuel/emulsifer blended mono-propellant developed by Firestar Technologies LLC. NOFBX™ is non-toxic and high performance. Vacuum specifc impulse testing shows that NOFBX™ blends have an Isp of greater than 310 seconds (vs. 235 sec for hydrazine monopropellant systems). NOFBX™ based systems are also highly throttleable (10-100×) due to a large variation in feed densities that can be fed into a NOFBX™ thruster. NOFBX™ may be used in a self pressurizing systems, simplifying the feed system and potentially increasing reliability over propulsion systems, which must mix fuels (bipropellants) and/or must be mechanically pumped. NOFBX™ systems are still under development, however some of the advantages of an NOFBX™ based propulsion system are becoming apparent:
 * Non-toxic
 * Space storable with storage temperatures of -77 to +100C
 * High Throttleability (10-100x)
 * Ability to create a self pressurizing system
 * Simpler one-fluid feed system with no "on the fly" mixing needed
 * No mechanical pumping needed

NOFBX™ Regeneratively Cooled Rocket Thrusters
In December of 2009 Firestar Technologies demonstrated the first successful monopropellant-gas-cooled rocket engine in history. The NOFBX™ thruster was ran well past thermal equilibrium in a >30s long run while going through a worst case pressure blow-down. Years of thermal analysis, experimentation and through the use of a highly complex manufacturing process enabled the fabrication of thrusters that are capable of burning NOFBX™ monopropellants in a regenerative mode. Regeneratively cooled NOFBX™ thrusters are cooled by the incoming monopropellant and do not need ablative coatings to survive the thermal environment.