This paper gives a brief review of methods for modifying metallic fuels for composite solid propellants, including the application of coatings onto aluminum particles (encapsulation). Requirements for the coating material are formulated. By means of thermodynamic calculations, it is shown that some fluorine-containing coatings reduce the content of the condensed phase in the propellant combustion products without decreasing the specific impulse. A mathematical model for the ignition of a single encapsulated particle is proposed. Calculations show a decrease in the ignition time of an aluminum particle with a fluorine-containing coating.
The combustion characteristics of propellants containing AP, HMX, an energetic binder, and aluminum particles with various polymer coatings are studied at pressures of 0.15 and 4.6 MPa. It is found that the coatings influence the burning rate, the particle size distribution of condensed combustion products, and the completeness of aluminum combustion. It is shown that the agglomeration can be reduced by using aluminum with fluorine-containing coatings. The application of some coatings results in a reduction in the mass of the agglomerates with an insignificant increase in their size. The greatest effect was achieved when using aluminum coated with (CH 2 CH CH 2 O) 2 Si[OCH 2 (CF 2 CF 2 ) 2 H] 2 [bis(allyloxy)-bis(2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5-octafluoropentyloxy)silane]. For this coating, a size reduction is also observed for micron-size oxide particles.
In this study, an experimental study of the burning rate of solid fuel in a model solid propellant rocket motor (SRM) E-5-0 was conducted using a non-invasive control method with fiber-optic sensors (FOSs). Three sensors based on the Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI), fixed on the SRM E-5-0, recorded the vibration signal during the entire cycle of solid fuel burning. The results showed that, when using MZI sensors, the non-invasive control of solid fuel burnout is made possible both by recording the time of arrival of the combustion front to the sensor and by analyzing the peaks on the spectrogram of the recorded FOS signal. The main mode of acoustic vibrations of the chamber of the model SRM is longitudinal, and it changes with time, depending on the chamber length. Longitudinal modes of the combustion chamber were detected by MZI only after the combustion front passed its fixing point, and the microphone was unable to register them at all. The results showed that the combustion rate was practically constant after the first second, which was confirmed by the graph of the pressure versus time at the nozzle exit.
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