NITROCHEMIE'S NEW GENERATION OF NITROCELLULOSE-BASED AND POLYMER-BOUNDED PROPELLANTS

摘要

Nitrochemie is a supplier of a family of special nitrocellulose-based propellants for modern car occupant safety systems. During the last three years NITROCHEMIE has successfully improved its products used in micro gas generators for seat belt preten-sioners to pass the long term ageing tests at elevated temperatures, as required by the USCAR. By optimizing the stabilizer system and by the supplement of a special gas-absorbing additive, weight losses after aging 408 h at 107°C can be successfully reduced down to 5%. Pressure-time curves as derived from closed vessel tests confirm the success. The drop of the maximum peak pressure due to ageing could be reduced from 30% to 5%. As shown in the paper the additive can be supplemented when assembling the micro gas generator or, more elegantly, directly into the dough of the single-base propellant during manufacture. Additional results underline the universality of the approach, being successful for a large number of different propellants. In order to reduce the amount of toxic carbon monoxide during combustion, NITROCHEMIE has developed a polymer binder system, which combines the advantages of extrudable compounds with the possibility to balance the oxygen content through the introduction of different inorganic oxidizers. Preliminary results confirm the expected superior thermal stability and thus explain the unchanged performance in closed vessel tests. Ignitability and form adaptability were found to be equivalent to nitrocellulose-based propellants.