Recent advances in hypergolic ionic liquids with broad potential for propellant applications

Abstract

As a promising choice of new-generation green propellant fuels, hypergolic ionic liquids (HILs) have attracted a great deal of interest in recent ten years, illustrated by their applications in the field of space science and exploring outer space. The design and syntheses of new ionic liquids (ILs) are the basis of the HILs’ sustainable development. In the recent years, many new HILs have been created through the rational design, and their hypergolic property and applications have been studied extensively. With the aim of familiarizing the reader with new trends in the area of HILs research, in this review we present the latest developments of new HILs including syntheses, properties, structure-property relationship and their applications in the field of liquid bipropellants, while the debatable issues and future challenges that need to be addressed are also discussed. Through this review, we intend that more readers may learn about the newest trends in the field of ionic liquid propellants, and it may also provide an additional catalyst for the vigorous development of new-generation green space propellants.

Keywords

• Hypergolic ionic liquids(HILs)
• Ignition
• Structure-property relationship
• development trend