Iranian Scientific Association of Energetic Materials

Burning rate accelerating catalysts are reckoned to be of important additives in the synthesis process of composite solid propellants on which much effort is made these days to suggest a novel procedure for their synthesis. Among many tasted chemicals, liquid ferrocene derivatives have been used much more vastly due to their better performance and suitable processability. But, these compounds start to migrate during the retention time which lead to destructive changes in propellant performance and more sensibility to undesired stimulations. In order to avoid  these problems, researchers have tried to graft them to HTPB prepolymer, Butacene is an attractive example of such compounds.

 According to the impotance of the produced polymers properties in synthesis process of solid propellant compounds, we have tried our best to synthesize the novel propacene burning rate accelerating catalyst by changing the chain length of ferrocene derivative grafted to the polymer and modifying the iron percentage. In the present study physical characteristics like density, viscosity, hydroxyl amount and the glass transition temperature of the product have been investigated. Iron content have also been determined by atomic absorption technique. The result of our experiments showed that propacene is better candidate due to its more suitable properties such as significant low viscosity and glass transition temprature and much better thermal resistance in comparison to butacene.