A Study of Flame Physics and Solid Propellant Rocket Physics

Topics that have been examined include heterogeneous propellant flame modeling, the construction of 1-dimensional flame models from subgrid 3-dimensional descriptions, aluminum agglomeration, the combustion of heterogeneous propellants containing aluminum, the use of a genetic algorithm to optimally define false-kinetics parameters in propellant combustion modeling, the calculation of fluctuations above a burning propellant and the effect of these fluctuations on the turbulent chamber flow, the 1-dimensional combustion of fine aluminum and ammonium perchlorate in fuel binder, the combustion of model propellant packs of ellipses and ellipsoids, and the packing of pellets relevant to igniter modeling. Other topics are the instabilities of smolder waves, premixed flame instabilities in narrow tubes, and flames supported by a spinning porous plug burner. Much of this work has been reported in the high-quality archival literature such as the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.