Re: slosh (was Re: Armadillo May 2, 2004)

At 07:08 PM 5/3/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>On Mon, 3 May 2004, John Carmack wrote:
> > If we find slosh to be an issue, our easiest correction will be to float a
> > bunch of stainless steel balls in the tank, which is effectively what they
> > did on Vanguard.
>
>Mmm, I'm not sure that will be very effective.  (I assume by "balls" you
>mean "floats".)  For cylindrical tanks, the main slosh mode is the surface
>going up on one side and down on the other, with actual liquid motion
>mostly somewhat below the surface.  I don't think floats are going to damp
>this very well.
>
>Vanguard was too skinny to have much of a slosh problem anyway -- it's
>almost entirely a function of diameter.  (Redstone at 178cm -- half again
>the diameter of Vanguard -- had no slosh problem, while Jupiter at 267cm
>had a serious one.)  Floats are more often used to try to isolate the
>propellant from the pressurant gas.
>
>                                                           Henry Spencer
>                                                        [email protected]

We are only 140 cm in diameter, so it may not be an issue at all...

John Carmack