Effect of the MoSi₂ coating on operational reliability of bipropellant rocket engine

¹ Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, Beijing 100190, China
² School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
³ Aerospace Research Institute of Materials and Processing Technology, Beijing 100076, China

^* Corresponding author: 3203zhen@163.com

Abstract

This present study investigated the MoSi2 coating and its effect on reliability of bipropellant rocket engine. This coating is developed to protect the chamber substrate material form oxidization under hightemperature oxidative circumstance as bipropellant engine works. The multilayer structure of the MoSi2 coating shows excellent high-temperature and thermal-cycle resistance. Its characteristic of self-healing leads to the good performance under the long-time steady working condition for rocket engines. A 25000-seconds firing test was conducted to testify the performance of MoSi2 coating under high temperature above 1400℃. In addition, the influence of coating surface morphology on liquid film cooling was fully discussed in experiment and simulation. High-speed microscopy camera was used to study the effects of Weber number on the spreading and lasting of cooling liquid-film. the simulative comparison was conducted by OpenFOAM to present different transfer-heat modes, when a droplet impinges on the high-temperature surface of MoSi2 coating. All results show that higher smoothness of the coating is suitable for liquid-film cooling, strengthening liquid film spread and heat transfer. Moreover, scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to study the effect of Mo layer residue on the coating thermal-cycle profermance. The test results indicates that Mo layer residue significantly cause penetrating cracks of the coating and then weaken the self-healing of the coating at downstream of throat. Therefore, it is important to strictly control the thickness of Mo layer by means of matching Mo target in ion plating. Thus after properly prolonging the infiltration time, Mo layer can be silicified completely without residue.