Safe, High-Performance Rocket Propellant and Motor Design Flight Tested
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists recently flight tested a novel rocket design that includes a high-energy fuel and a motor design that also delivers a high degree of safety. Traditional solid-fuel rocket motors work by combining a fuel and an oxidizer to enhance the burning of the fuel. In higher-energy fuels this mixture can be somewhat unstable, and can contain sensitive explosives that can detonate under high shock loads or high temperatures. The new rocket fuel and motor design adds a higher degree of safety by separating the fuel from the oxidizer, both novel formulations that are, by themselves, not able to detonate. After years of development and bench-top static tests, the new rocket design was recently flight tested at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center's Socorro launch site, part of New Mexico Tech. The Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists will now work to scale-up the design, as well as explore miniaturization of the system, in order to exploit all potential applications that would require high-energy, high-velocity, and correspondingly high safety margins.
Transcript
00:00:05 Rocket Launch: Whoosh! Bryce Tappan: In the field of both rocket propellants and explosives, there's this desire to get safer materials and higher-energy materials. Typically when you look at something that's high performance, it's not as safe a material. So what we're trying to do is break that performance versus sensitivity curve and make a rocket propellant that's both very high energy and high-performance, as well as very safe. The enabling technology that makes our propellant system both safer and higher energy involves physically separating an energetic fuel material and a solid oxidizer. Because the fuels are physically separated from the oxidizer, which is different from a typical solid rocket propellant that has the fuel and the oxidizer intimately mixed, then you can utilize higher-energy propellants. Three … Two … One … Zero! Whoosh! Most of the project throughout the years that we've
00:01:16 been working on it have been static rocket tests, where we have a thrust stand and we'll measure, say, the chamber pressure of that rocket and the thrust that's released as we burn it. And it was just the end that we wanted to do a flight demonstration, which is also very good for collecting quantitative data, looking at how fast the rocket will go, how far it will go. Bang! Whoosh! Our rockets outperformed the commercial motor in primarily the thrust and velocity that was achieved. We were able to at least double the velocity of the commercial rockets. Whoosh! Whoosh! There's two things that we would like to do with this rocket system right now. One is scale up, go to larger motors, but also we're looking to miniaturize, to explore all the application space that we can. And one of the potential applications that requires high safety is flying on very small satellites.
00:02:21 So, if you could get a very small propellant package that packed more punch, then that would be very advantageous. Once we saw that successful launch go off, it was the culmination of a lot of years of research that -- it was very satisfying to see it fly and to have a completely successful launch.