Powdered Propellant Rocket Motor

The preliminary design of a DAC motor using a powdered solid propellant, injected as an aerosol into the combustion chamber in a controlled manner, is formulated in this program. The injection methodology is based on a recent design developed for injecting nano and micron sized powdered metallic fuel into a scramjet combustion chamber. A variant of this design will be constructed and tested in this program, providing key data needed for the CFD-based design studies, such as percentage of powdered propellant that can be carried by the aerosol and how this varies with particle properties. The burning characteristics of the powdered propellant, which will be dependant on the size and shape of the particles as well as its composition, will be determined by laboratory studies, yielding the burn rate data needed by the CFD for motor design. CFD studies will be performed using advanced models that have been applied to analyze a variety of particulate combustion problems. The dependence of motor performance on the key parameters (such as the injected aerosol mass flux, the size of the particles, etc.) will be established, and a preliminary DAC motor design will be formulated which meets nominal performance standards.