Research on the Equivalent Modeling Approach for the Mesoscopic Mechanical Properties of Composite Solid Propellants

Abstract

To simplify the mesoscopic model of composite solid propellant as well as to improve the computational efficiency, a novel equivalent modeling approach is adopted to calculate the mechanical properties of composite solid propellant, which uses a dynamics approach to establish the equivalent matrix model of small ammonium perchlorate (AP) particles, aluminum (Al) particles, and matrix materials. This equivalent matrix serves as the basis for constructing a new mesoscale model with large AP particles. The equivalent modeling approach was used to investigate the effects of particle filler volume fraction, particle size dimension, and representative volume element (RVE) size, on the mechanical properties of composite solid propellants. The direct modeling approach was used to verify the computational accuracy of the equivalent modeling approach, and some of the results were used in experiments for comparison. The results show that the equivalent modeling approach exhibits high computational accuracy in calculating the mechanical properties of solid propellants.