Research On Safety Characteristics Of HTPE Propellant

As a typical representative of propellants, hydroxyl-terminated polyether (HTPE) propellant has good development foreground due to its remarkable insensitive property and perfect mechanics performance. For selecting optimum formula of HTPE propellant, the two different formula, HOI and H02, are selected as the object for research on the safety characteristics.Firstly, the study on the thermal behavior of HOI and H02 at linear temperature increase and adiabatic condition, were carried out by dynamic differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and accelerating rate calorimeter (ARC) respectively, the kinetic parameters of thermal decomposition were calculated. Then, thermal response characteristics of the two samples at different cook-off condition were measured by slow cook-off test and fast cook-off test. Finally, according to the research on heat fluxes and different scale gap tests, the hazards of H01 and H02 were graded.The DSC results showed that, under linear temperature increase condition, the first exothermic peak of both two samples displayed the detail decomposition information of A3 plasticizer, the initial decomposition temperature and peak temperature of HOI is in concordance with H02 at same heating rate. The ARC measurements displayed that:the initial decomposition temperature of H01 (147.78℃) is higher than HOI (136.44℃), the adiabatic temperature rise and the maximum temperature rising rate of HOI is bigger than H02. In the slow cook-off test, the response temperature of HOI and H02 are 119.6℃ and 130.8℃ respectively. The reaction violence of HOI is burning up but H02 is detonation. In the fast cook-off test, the response time of HOI and H02 are 67 seconds and 81 seconds, and the fast thermal decomposition occurred for both two samples. The heat fluxes calculated by the formula in 5m and 15m distance showed that the two samples meet the hazardous materials standards of item 1.4. Through testing the shock waves sensitivity of HTPE propellants, H01 and H02 were classed as item 1.1.