Hypergolicity and ignition delay study of gelled ethanolamine fuel

Abstract

An experimental investigation on achieving hypergolicity with a critical catalyst concentration and measuring ignition delay of non-metalized and metalized gelled ethanolamine was performed with hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer. The experimental results of using high speed camera were obtained by adopting the drop tests in this work. This study represented a sufficient repeatability of ignition delay for hypergolic bipropellant system. Gelled ethanolamine fuel (non-metalized and metalized with nano-sized metal particle substitution) with metal catalysts presented the results in hypergolicity with ignition delays of the order of 1-5 ms in most of the cases, which was comparable to the existing liquid hypergolic bipropellant systems. However, the minimum ignition delay time was recorded for pure-CCAT case. Moreover, the calculated activation energy (E-vis) for the gelled ethanolamine fuel for non-metalized and metalized systems was within the range of 0.03-0.06 kJ/mole along with shear thinning behavior. Parameters such as apparent viscosity of the fuels, blended energetic particle, catalyst type along with its critical concentration using the drop impact plays an important role in studying the hypergolicity and ignition delay time of the gel bipropellant.