Gaseous, Liquid, and Gelled Propellant Hypergolic Reaction Mechanisms

ORBITEC proposes a parallel computational and experimental effort to understand the phenomena underlying hypergolic ignition of gelled propellants. Gelled hypergolic propellants offer many benefits to modern propulsion systems. They offer good insensitive munitions characteristics and versatile performance. However, gelled propellants typically exhibit longer ignition delays than liquid propellants. In order to realize their advantages without risking potential catastrophic failures associated with long delays, these ignition issues must be understood and overcome. The proposed program will break the complex ignition delay behavior into fundamental problems and devise laboratory and modeling experiments to address each. In each case, the experiments will assay the effect of the gellant on the particular phenomenon. The Phase I work will accomplish the majority of the modeling and will include exploratory laboratory experiments to select diagnostics appropriate for investigating each selected process. The Phase II program will conduct these experiments and measure ignition delays in a multiple impinging stream vortex injection (MISVI) thrust chamber. Via a suite of analytical techniques, the proposed work will elucidate each of the fundamental phenomena along the path to ignition, yielding an understanding of each process, the competition among them, the effect of the gellants, and the resulting regimes of ignition.