Feasibility Study and Demonstration of an Aluminum and Ice Solid Propellant

Aluminum-water reactions have been proposed and studied for several decades for underwater propulsion systems and applications requiring hydrogen generation. Aluminum and water have also been proposed as a frozen propellant, and there have been proposals for other refrigerated propellants that could be mixed, frozen in situ, and used as solid propellants. However, little work has been done to determine the feasibility of these concepts. With the recent availability of nanoscale aluminum, a simple binary formulation with water is now feasible. Nanosized aluminum has a lower ignition temperature than micronsized aluminum particles, partly due to its high surface area, and burning times are much faster than micron aluminum. Frozen nanoscale aluminum and water mixtures are stable, as well as insensitive to electrostatic discharge, impact, and shock. Here we report a study of the feasibility of an nAl-ice propellant in small-scale rocket experiments. The focus here is not to develop an optimized propellant; however improved formulations are possible. Several static motor experiments have been conducted, including using a flight-weight casing. The flight weight casing was used in the first sounding rocket test of an aluminum-ice propellant, establishing a proof of concept for simple propellant mixtures making use of nanoscale particles

Hydrodynamics of shear coaxial liquid rocket injectors

Hydrodynamic instabilities within injector passages can couple to chamber acoustic modes and lead to unacceptable levels of combustion instabilities inside liquid rocket engines. The instability of vena-contracta regions and mixing between fuel and oxidizer can serve as a fundamental source of unsteadiness produced by the injector, even in the absence of upstream or downstream pressure perturbations. This natural or “unforced” response can provide valuable information regarding frequencies where the element could conceivably couple to chamber modes. In particular, during throttled conditions the changes in the injector response may lead to an alignment of the injector and chamber modes. For these reasons, the basic unforced response of the injector element is of particular interest when developing a new engine. The Loci/Chem code was used to perform single-element, 2-D unsteady CFD computations on the Hydrogen/Oxygen Multi-Element Experiment (HOMEE) injector which was hot-fire tested at Purdue University. The Loci/Chem code was used to evaluate the effects of O/F ratio, LOX post thickness, recess length and LOX tube length on the hydrodynamics of shear co-axial rocket injectors