Energetic-material combustion experiments on propellant formulations containing prilled ammonium dinitramide

Energetic material combustion experiments were performed on propellant formulations containing ammonium dinitramide prills. The overall performance of the formulation was found to be sensitive to the prill microstructure. The combustion experiments show that the performance of the composition could be further improved by “tailoring” the microstructural characteristics of the prills. These parameters are not revealed by strand burning-rate measurements, which represent an average or overall measurement and pick up on the localized rate variations as “noise”, averaging them out. Microstructural characterization (such as filming of the propellant combustion at the highest magnifications and examination of quenched samples) of propellant formulations may thus provide some of the complementary data to the standard propellant characterization measurements to reduce or eliminate measurement errors. Furthermore, with prilling the errors are reduced and the performance is improved.