With the increasingly stringent controls being placed on the use of hydrazine and its derivatives, "green" propellants such as hydrogen peroxide are receiving much interest from the space industry. This paper describes the development of an instrumented catalyst bed used to assess the performance and lifetime of catalysts used to promote the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. The catalyst bed design and preliminary findings are described. Two catalysts have been tested with 87.5% concentration hydrogen peroxide: 0.5% platinum on alumina pellets and silver gauze. The preliminary results show that the 0.5% platinum pellets have a higher performance, achieving a steady state decomposition efficiency of 95.4%, with neither catalyst showing signs of exhaustion.
展开▼
