Thermal decomposition and combustion behavior of solid propellant containing Si-based composites

In this work, Si@NC/AP and Si@PVDF/CL-20 composites with different Si contents have been fabricated by spray-drying technique. The flame structure, ignition delay time and combustion process have been investigated. It has been shown that the ignition delay of Si-based fuel with 40 wt% of Si is the shortest. This means that oxygen balance and the catalytic effect of Si on the energetic composites are playing a dominant role during the combustion processes of these composites. The solid composite propellants (SCP, named as SCP-1 and SCP-2) contains two typical Si-based composites Si-80@NC/AP and Si-80@PVDF/CL-20 have been prepared for propellant applications. Their propellants containing the corresponding mechanical mixtures (named as SCP-3 and SCP-4) have been fabricated as a comparison. It has been observed that the cross sections of propellants containing Si-based composites are denser than that of the reference propellants. The burn rate of SCP-1 (with Si-80@NC/AP) and SCP-2 (with Si-80@PVDF/CL-20) are 5.74 and 5.10 mm s⁻¹ at 2.0 MPa, respectively, which are lower than those of the reference samples SCP-3 (6.51 mm s⁻¹) and SCP-4 (5.70 mm s⁻¹). However, the pressure exponent of former is slightly lower than that of the latter. Moreover, the combustion products (CCPs) of SCP-1 and SCP-3 are more fluffy and smaller in particles size than those of SCP-2 and SCP-4. This indicates that the core-shell structured composites have much better combustion performances due to better heat and mass transfer between the oxidizers and Si as fuel.