Burning behavior of energetic composite nanofibers

Metal fuels, such as aluminum and magnesium, are principle ingredients in solid composite propellants. Powdered metal fuels are intimately mixed with oxidizer and immobilized with polymer binder. Recent years, metallized nanoparticles have been suggested to be potential replacements for conventional metal powders in propellant systems because of their faster oxidation kinetics which could lead to potential significantly enhanced burning rate of the propellants and specific impulse. In this study, we fabricated energetic composite nanofibrous mats by a one-step electrospinning method. The as prepared energetic composite nanofibers contain both nanoaluminum fuel and oxidizer nanoparticles incorporated in nitrocellulose (NC) binder. By tuning the mass loading and equivalence ratio of nanoaluminum and metal oxide nanoparticles in the precursors, energetic composite nanofibrous mats with different equivalence ratio and mass loading were successfully fabricated. The energetic composite nanofibrous mats (NC/Al-CuO, NC/Al-Fe₂O₃, NC/Al-Bi₂O₃) were characterized and tested for their burning behavior, and compared with the pure nitrocellulose and nanoaluminum incorporated nanofibers. Energetic composite nanofibrous mats showed enhanced burning rates, which correlate to the mass loading of relative to binder in nanofibers. The energetic composite nanofibers produced by the electrospinning method demonstrate the possibility of avoiding some of the problems associated with melt casting nanometalized propellants.