Numerical solution and experimental verification of combustion products of propellant gas fluid containing ionization seeds

Abstract

The determination of combustion product components of propellant containing ionization seeds has important applications in aerospace, magnetohydrodynamic power generation, artillery barrel life extension and other fields. This work determines the composition of combustion products of solid propellant containing ionization seeds under high pressure. Considering the ionization condition and Debye-Hückel correction, the minimum Gibbs free energy constraint function was constructed, and a fast method to solve the constraint function based on the exterior point penalty function method and conjugate gradient method was proposed. Spectral experiments were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the numerical method. Then, the numerical solution and experimental verification of equilibrium components (including the electron density) of combustion products of the propellant containing Cs ionization seeds in a wide range of temperature (400–4000 K) and pressure (0.1–500 MPa) were completed. The results show that the main components (CO2, CO, H2O, H2, N2) of the propellant combustion products changed at low temperature (T 1500 K). When the pressure was low (P < 10 MPa), the pressure affected the components. When the pressure was higher, the influence of pressure on the components gradually weakened. The electron density of combustion products exponentially increased with the increase in temperature and gradually decreased with the increases in pressure and ionization seed content. This method enhances the speed and accuracy of determining combustion product components under ionization conditions.

Keywords

• Propellants
• Ionization seeds
• Combustion products
• Minimum Gibbs free energy
• External penalty function method
• Spectrum experiment