Decomposition and ignition of HAN-based monopropellants by electrolysis

In this paper, electrolytically-induced HAN ignition has been studied. The purpose of the present study is to identify the various parameters and mechanisms dictating the electrolytic ignition of HAN-based monopropellants. Electrochemical mechanisms are established and incorporated into an existing chemical kinetics scheme developed by Lee and Litzinger. The ignition of HAN-water solution by electrolysis has been treated numerically using a constant pressure, homogeneous reactor model. A stiff ODE solver was used in the analysis to handle the highly stiff species conservation and the energy equations. The analysis focuses on the temporal evolution of temperature and condensed and gas phase species. Parametric studies were conducted to investigate the effect of electric current, voltage, volume, initial temperature, and HAN concentration on the ignition time delay. The ignition time delay is found to decrease with increase in current, temperature, and HAN concentration and increase with volume.