Rheological Characterization of Ethanolamine Gel Propellants

Abstract

Ethanolamine is considered to be an environmentally friendly propellant system because it has low toxicity and is noncarcinogenic in nature. In this article, efforts are made to formulate and prepare ethanolamine gel systems, using pure agarose and hybrids of paired gelling agents (agarose + polyvinylpyrrolidine (PVP), agarose + SiO2, and PVP + SiO2), that exhibit a measurable yield stress, thixotropic behavior under shear rate ranges of 1-1,000 s(-1) and a viscoelastic nature. To achieve these goals, multiple rheological experiments (including flow and dynamic studies) are performed. In this article, results are presented from experiments measuring the apparent viscosity, yield stress, thixotropy, dynamic strain, frequency sweep, and tan behaviors, as well as the effects of the test temperature, in the gel systems. The results show that the formulated ethanolamine gels are thixotropic in nature with yield stress between 30 and 60Pa. The apparent viscosity of the gel decreases as the test temperature increases, and the apparent activation energy is the lowest for the ethanolamine-(PVP + SiO2) gel system. The dynamic rheology study shows that the type of gellant, choice of hybrid gelling materials and their concentration, applied frequencies, and strain all vitally affect the viscoelastic properties of the ethanolamine gel systems. In the frequency sweep experiment, the ethanolamine gels to which agarose, agarose + PVP, and agarose + SiO2 were added behave like linear frequency-dependent viscoelastic liquids, whereas the ethanolamine gel to which PVP + SiO2 was added behaves like a nearly frequency-independent viscoelastic solid. The variation in the tan of these gelled propellants as a function of frequency is also discussed.