History
1857 - Siemens introduced the Regenerative cooling concept. On 10 May 1898, James Dewar used regenerative cooling to become the first to statically liquefy hydrogen. The concept of regenerative cooling was also mentioned in 1903 in an article by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Robert Goddard built the first regeneratively cooled engine in 1923, but rejected the scheme as too complex. A regeneratively cooled engine was built by the Italian researcher, Gaetano Arturo Crocco in 1930. The first Soviet engines to employ the technique were Fridrikh Tsander's OR-2 tested in March 1933 and the ORM-50, bench tested in November 1933 by Valentin Glushko. The first German engine of this type was also tested in March 1933 by Klaus Riedel in the VfR. The Austrian scientist Eugen Sänger was particularly famous for experiments with engine cooling starting in 1933; however, most of his experimental engines were water-cooled or cooled by an extra circuit of propellant.
The V-2 rocket engine, the most powerful of its time at 25 tons (245 kN) of thrust, was regeneratively cooled, in a design by Walter Thiel, by fuel lines coiled around the outside of the combustion chamber. This was an inefficient design that required the burning of diluted alcohol at low chamber pressure to avoid melting the engine. The American Redstone engine used the same design.
A key innovation in regenerative cooling was the Soviet U-1250 engine designed by Aleksei Mihailovich Isaev in 1945. Its combustion chamber was lined by a thin copper sheet supported by the corrugated steel wall of the chamber. Fuel flowed through the corrugations and absorbed heat very efficiently. This permitted more energetic fuels and higher chamber pressures, and it is the basic plan used in all Russian engines since. Modern American engines solve this problem by lining the combustion chamber with brazed copper or nickel alloy tubes (although recent engines like in the Boeing Delta IV have started to use the Russian technique which is cheaper to construct). The American style of lining the engine with copper tubes is called the "spaghetti construction", and the concept is credited to Edward A. Neu at Reaction Motors Inc. in 1947.
Read more about this topic: Regenerative Cooling (rocket)
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