The psychologist Edward de Bono, who died earlier this year, popularised lateral thinking (doi:10.1136/bmj.n1831).1 An IBM researcher told Bono that his book Six Thinking Hats reduced meeting times to a quarter of what they had been. Creative thinking, argued “is skill can be practised and nurtured.” That may so, but through innovative solutions strategies requires time—and time is commodity cu...

You have a rocket in high circular orbit around massive central body (a planet, or the Sun) and wish to escape with fastest possible speed at infinity for given amount of fuel.

Acrylonitrilebutadiene-styrene (ABS) thermoplastic is evaluated as a potential fuel for hybrid rocket motors and compared to the widely used fuel material Hydroxyl-Terminated Polybutadiene (HTPB). For this project Nitrous Oxide (N2O) is used as the matching oxidizer. ABS is widely mass-produced for non-combustion applications including household plumbing and structural materials. Analytical pre...

Dietary nitrate (found in green leafy vegetables such as rocket and in beetroot) is now recognized to be an important source of nitric oxide, via the nitrate-nitrite-NO pathway. Dietary nitrate confers several cardiovascular beneficial effects on blood pressure, platelets, endothelial function, mitochondrial efficiency and exercise. Having described key twists and turns in the elucidation of th...

Large scale application of ammonium-perchlorate in the composite rocket fuels defines this compound as an important strategic material. The high content of oxygen in ammonium-perchlorate (54.5% w/w) and the fact that during the thermal decomposition does not yield solid residue, determines its application as an exceptional and irreplaceable oxidative compound in the composite rocket fuels. The ...

One of the drawbacks of hybrid rocket motors is the limited regression rate of the fuel grain, which impacts on the scalablility of the type. A number of methods of increasing this have been proposed and successfully tested, in particular the use of swirling oxidiser flow to create turbulence and increase the local oxidiser mass flux. However, many of these have limitations in practical motors ...

A visualization facility has been developed at Stanford University in order to study flow in a turbulent combustion boundary layer. The motivation for the facility arises from recent studies of fast burning fuels for hybrid rocket propulsion where droplet lift-off from the melting fuel surface is the dominant mass transfer mechanism. The facility, shown in Figure 1, has been used to image the c...

Prior to World War II, hydrazine was primarily of scientific interest without wide application for practical purposes. However, during World War II the Germans developed techniques for the production of hydrazine hydrate on a tonnage scale for use as rocket and jet fuel, and since then hydrazine and its derivatives have attracted increasing attention from chemists, manufacturers, and the milita...