How do the Shuttle engines start – Pyro-electric fuse on Oxygen+Hydrogen jet or like internal combustion engines?
Certainly not like an internal combustion engine, it s a multi-stage start-up. We have oxidizer pre-burners, fuel pre-burners, and oxidizer valve, high-pressure turbo valves. It s very complex and without a course in thermal dynamics and heat and mass transfer it s be kind of tough to really explain it to you, but I ll do the best I can. What happens is we ll open the main fuel valve, this will allow the liquid hydrogen to begin to flow towards the engine. At that point we begin to open the pre-burner valves, before everything goes into the main combustion chamber, the oxygen and hydrogen are burned a little bit first to start generating some turbine speed. The turbine speed is then used to drive the high-pressure fuel turbo pump. and the high-pressure oxidizer turbo pump. Once that happens you can start feeding that stuff really quickly and then it begins to flow into the combustion chamber, and there is the big plate where they have hundreds of tubes welded to it and you begin to inj
