Characterization of the hypergolic ignition of green fuels with hydrogen peroxide by drop test and jet impingement

Abstract

This work presents an experimental study on the hypergolic behavior of variants of N,N,N’,N’-tetramethylethylenediamine (TMEDA)/N,N-dimethylethanolamine (DMEA) system, named PAHyp 0, with 93 wt% hydrogen peroxide. Two different copper-based catalyst and one cobalt-based catalytic agent were dissolved in the fuels to trigger the pre-ignition reactions. When employing copper chloride dihydrate, the resultant fuel requires methanol (ternary system) as a stabilizing agent, whereas both carboxylic salts of copper and cobalt dissolved in TMEDA/DMEA deliver a stable formulation (binary system) without the need for any organic solvent. Shadowgraph high-speed imaging was used to capture the ignition process and pressure wave development of over 30 fuel samples in a modified drop test. An ignition/stability envelope was proposed to map the safe and unstable formulations. It was demonstrated that the concentration of TMEDA should be no more than 50% in the binary system, while the amount of methanol should fall within a concentration window of 33 to 50% in the ternary system. Lower loadings of catalyst, ranging from 0.5 to 1.0 wt%, are required to deliver stable fast-igniting fuels. Three promising formulations catalyzed with 1 wt% copper salts were selected to perform impinging jet fire experiments. Impinging jets yielded significantly lower ignition delay times than drop tests due to the better mixing conditions. However, it was verified that ignition may fail for low values of jet velocities, below 0.8 m/s, and for high jet velocities, exceeding 14 m/s. An attempt to explain the ignition and non-ignition events was made by using the fundamentals of explosion limits of the hydrogen/oxygen system and oxidation reactions at low temperature. Remarkably, ultra-fast ignitions of about 10 ms were measured by the impinging jet setup within near-optimal operational conditions. Therefore, TMEDA/DMEA-based fuels with reduced catalyst loadings (0.5–1.0 wt%) offer new opportunities in aerospace propulsion and should be further studied.