SBIR-STTR Award

There is widespread interest in reducing the toxicity and environmental hazards associated with conventional bipropellants. Use of gelling agents has been shown to reduce the fuel's toxicity. However the resultant gel often have significantly different rheological and combustion properties including loss of hypergolicity. Use of these gels requires extensive modifications to fuel storage, transport systems as well as to the engines and may require high temperature combustion initiation systems. These modifications result in severe flight-weight and energy penalties. To address these drawbacks, Ogden Engineering & Associates, LLC (OE&A) is proposing to utilize novel additive technologies developed by the project team to create fuel formulations which exhibit significantly reduced ignition delay times as compared to the "neat" green propellants and approaches or attains hypergolic reactivity with standard oxidizers such as IRFNA over a range of fuel to oxidizer ratios. Development of these hypergolic green fuel formulations (HGFF) should allow use of standard bi-propellant engines without major modification. This strategy eliminates the weight and power requirements associated with high-temperature combustion initiation systems. Phase I technical objectives include conducting micro-combustion experiments on various HGFF formulations, obtain rheological and materials compatibility data and develop injector designs suitable for HFGG use

There is widespread interest in reducing the toxicity and environmental hazards associated with conventional bipropellants. Use of gelling agents has been shown to reduce the fuel’s toxicity. However the resultant gels often have significantly different rheological and combustion properties. Use of these materials requires extensive modifications to fuel storage and transport systems as well as combustion engines and may require high temperature combustion initiation systems. These modifications result in severe flight-weight and energy penalties. Ogden Engineering & Associates, LLC was awarded a Phase I SBIR project to address these ongoing needs and to gain a fundamental understanding and preliminary characterization of novel hypergolic green fuels. Through this Phase II proposal, the project team aims to further this understanding and intends to fully characterize a novel green fuel formulation as a potential replacement for existing, propellants that have undesirable toxic characteristics. Specific activities include optimizing chemical formulations and solvent additives to obtain reliable hypergolic combustion, and to identify conditions where the fuel can be used as a monopropellant and develop hardware for these applications.

Keywords:
HYPERGOLLIC GREEN FUELS, MICROCOMBUSTION ANALYSES, MONOPROPELLANTS, BIPROPELLANTS