People in the solid rocket business discovered this by accident (literally!). If the burning discovers a crack, the rate of burning goes way up & the rocket blows up. You might check the geometry that these rockets use -- I would imagine that most would want to keep the overall pressure relatively constant, so the burning surface area should remain constant, as well. At 09:26 AM 4/26/2006, David Wolfe wrote:
A question struck me in the shower this morning:
Suppose you would like a piece of soap which dissolves at a uniform rate. I.e., as it gets smaller, the soap bar's surface area remains constant until it vanishes.
I have convinced myself that one should be able to construct such a bar of soap with arbitrarily small holes. As the soap gets smaller, the holes are exposed to increase the surface area.
Need it have holes?