Armadillo Aerospace News: Air Liquide peroxide, Misc, Welded engines

We fired one of our engines with 50% unstabilized semiconductor grade peroxide from Air Liquide. It worked perfectly. This actually looks cleaner than the 50% propulsion grade we got from FMC – the Air Liquide reads 1 ppm on the TDS meter, while the FMC stock reads 4 ppm to 5 ppm. (stabilized Solvay food grade read 18 ppm, and stabilized FMC technical grade read 232 ppm)
It looks like our supply problems are finally over. We have a solid engine combination, and a willing propellant supplier. Hurray! It sucked that the lack of 90% peroxide prevented us from flying any vehicles for the last eight months, but all the work that went into the mixed-monoprop propulsion system has probably been for the best anyway. The propellant is several times cheaper, gives 20% better Isp, and is generally better to work with (less caustic, and less material sensitive). The development work has also given us catalysts that we will be able to use with 98% peroxide when we are ready to work on high energy upper stage biprop engines. Read More