Rocket fuel that's cleaner, safer and still full of energy

rocket
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Research published this week in Science Advances shows that it may be possible to create rocket fuel that is much cleaner and safer than the hypergolic fuels that are commonly used today. And still just as effective. The new fuels use simple chemical "triggers" to unlock the energy of one of the hottest new materials, a class of porous solids known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. MOFs are made up of clusters of metal ions and an organic molecule called a linker.

Satellites and space stations that remain in orbit for a considerable amount of time rely on hypergols, fuels that are so energetic they will immediately ignite in the presence of an oxidizer (since there is no oxygen to support combustion beyond the Earth's atmosphere). The hypergolic fuels that are currently mainly in use depend on hydrazine, a highly toxic and dangerously unstable chemical compound made up of a combination of nitrogen and hydrogen atoms. Hydrazine-based fuels are so carcinogenic that people who work with it need to get suited up as though they were preparing for themselves. Despite precautions, around 12,000 tons of hydrazine fuels end up being released into the atmosphere every year by the aerospace industry.

"This is a new, cleaner approach to making highly combustible fuels, that are not only significantly safer than those currently in use, but they also respond or combust very quickly, which is an essential quality in ," says Tomislav Friščić. He is a professor in the Chemistry Department at McGill, and co-senior author on the paper along with former McGill researcher Robin D. Rogers.

Research published this week in Science Advances shows that it may be possible to create rocket fuel that is much cleaner and safer than the hypergolic fuels that are commonly used today. And still just as effective. Credit: McGill University

"Although we are still in the of working with these materials in the lab, these results open up the possibility of developing a class of new, clean and highly tunable hypergolic fuels for the ," says the first author, Hatem Titi, a post-doctoral fellow who works in Friščić's lab.

Friscis is interested in commercializing this technology, and will work with McGill and Acsynam, an existing spin-off company from his laboratory, to make this happen.

More information: "Hypergolic zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) as next-generation solid fuels: Unlocking the latent energetic behavior of ZIFs" Science Advances (2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav9044 , advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/4/eaav9044

Journal information: Science Advances

Provided by McGill University

Citation: Rocket fuel that's cleaner, safer and still full of energy (2019, April 5) retrieved 29 March 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rocket-fuel-cleaner-safer-full.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

Explore further

Greener fuels to propel rocket launches into space

416 shares

Feedback to editors