Experimental and Numerical Study of Casting Process Effects on Small Scale Solid Rocket Motor Ballistic Behavior

Small-scale rocket motors are widely used by propulsion industries to carry out burn rate measurement for a variety of needs. Several automated data-reduction procedures have been implemented to derive burn rate from pressure-time profiles resulting from experimentation. Even if these are easy and fast to use, these procedures are not completely reliable in that these measure only the average behaviour of a motor. A new model has recently been proposed to overcome this problem. However, it was soon noticed that the results depend on the propellant grain production and forming processes even if the motor hardware is the same. A series of propellant grains has been produced to be sampled to map the local ballistic behaviour and changes introduced by the manufacturing process. In this study, sampling and testing procedures are reported and the results of an almost complete grain mapping are discussed.

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“…The variation of burn rate along the radius is expected to be very small (less than 5% in some cases reported in literature [10][11] ) .…”

Section: Radial Burn Rate Profilesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Burn-rate Measurement on Small-scale Rocket Motors

Maggi

Luca

Bandera

et al. 2006

DSJ

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“…Formulations equivalent to the ones described by the strong forms (12) and (13) can be obtained by minimizing the functionals, LB:…”

Section: B Hashin-shtrikman Variational Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such granular flows and compaction phenomena are critical among other applications to modeling manufacturing procedures. For example, an uneven burning profile is observed in solid propellants due to particle alignment across the propellant grain, which is attributed to the casting process [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Microstructure-statistics-property relations of anisotropic polydisperse particulate composites using tomography

2013

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In this paper, a systematic method is presented for developing microstructure-statistics-property relations of anisotropic polydisperse particulate composites using microcomputer tomography (micro-CT). Micro-CT is used to obtain a detailed three-dimensional representation of polydisperse microstructures, and an image processing pipeline is developed for identifying particles. In this work, particles are modeled as idealized shapes in order to guide the image processing steps and to provide a description of the discrete micro-CT data set in continuous Euclidean space. n-point probability functions used to describe the morphology of mixtures are calculated directly from real microstructures. The statistical descriptors are employed in the Hashin-Shtrikman variational principle to compute overall anisotropic bounds and self-consistent estimates of the thermal-conductivity tensor. We make no assumptions of statistical isotropy nor ellipsoidal symmetry, and the statistical description is obtained directly from micro-CT data. Various mixtures consisting of polydisperse ellipsoidal and spherical particles are prepared and studied to show how the morphology impacts the overall anisotropic thermal-conductivity tensor.

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“…The burning rate of the propellant plays a crucial role in predicting flight performance [2,6,7], affected by factors such as grain shape, particle orientation, air bubbles, and more [5,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Manufacturing processes also impact ballistic performance [15][16][17], with macroscopic and microscopic phenomena potentially altering thrust profiles [18,19]. One notable phenomenon is particle migration and segregation caused by the casting process, which gives rise to grain heterogeneity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Particle migration modeling in solid propellants

Andriulli

2023

Materials Research Proceedings

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Abstract. This work presents the development of an OpenFOAM solver to predict the migration of solid particles in concentrated suspensions under non-uniform shear flow. The solver modifies the pimpleFoam solver by implementing the conservation equation for particle volume fraction. It adapts the equation of motion for non-Newtonian flows and establishes a model for the viscous field using Krieger's correlation. The code is successfully validated by the experimental results from literature.

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Experimental and Numerical Study of Casting Process Effects on Small Scale Solid Rocket Motor Ballistic Behavior

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Burn-rate Measurement on Small-scale Rocket Motors

Burn-rate Measurement on Small-scale Rocket Motors

Microstructure-statistics-property relations of anisotropic polydisperse particulate composites using tomography

Particle migration modeling in solid propellants

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