Porosity Effect of the Silver Catalyst in Hydrogen Peroxide Monopropellant Thruster

Abstract

In monopropellant system, hydrogen peroxide is used with catalyst to create an exothermic reaction. Catalyst made of silver among the popular choice for this application. Since the catalyst used is in porous state, the effect of its porosity in the hydrogen peroxide monopropellant thruster performances is yet unknown. The porosity changes depending on factors including catalyst pact compaction pressure, bed dimension, and type of catalyst used. As researches on this topic is relatively small, the optimum porosity value is usually left out. The performance of the thruster indicated by the pressure drop across the catalyst bed. Porosity of the catalyst bed adds additional momentum sink to the momentum equation that contributes to the pressure gradient which lead to pressure loss inside thruster. The effect of porosity influences the performance and precision of the thruster. Study of the pressure drop by the catalyst bed requires a lengthy period and expensive experiments, however, numerical simulation by mean of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be an alternative. In this paper, 90 wt% hydrogen peroxide solution with silver catalyst is studied in order to investigate the influence of porosity to the performances of the thruster, and to find the optimum porosity of the thruster. Species transport model is applied in the single-phase reaction simulation using the EDM for turbulence-chemistry interaction. Through this study, the effect of porosity towards the thruster performances represented in term of pressure drop, exit velocity, bed temperature, and thrust, and porosity of 0.4 found to be as an optimal value.