Assembly and Combustion Properties of Energetic Mesoparticles

Energetic materials are materials which can release large amounts of energy in a short time interval. When the size of energetic materials is reduced from micro into nanoscale, the reactivity of energetic materials increases dramatically due to increase in intimate contact and faster mass and heat transfer. Finding an efficient way to synthesize energetic nanocomposites has become an import research topic. Here I demonstrate the use of electrospray methods to generate mesostructured microparticles containing nanomaterials and a gas generator. The system was designed for characterization of the size distribution as well as combustion properties. In this thesis, size distribution of the Al/NC mesoparticles is tuned from 0.7-2.0 µm, and the ignition delay is shown significantly decrease (15 ms to 3 ms) compared to nano-size Al. The burn time is also decreased significantly (4036 µs to 366 µs) by using electrospray assembly. This demonstrated that assembly of nanocomponents can significantly impact combustion performance.