A new dendrimer containing ferrocene units is used as an efficient combustion catalyst for ammonium perchlorate-based propellant.

Ferrocene-based compounds are promising burning rate catalysts due to their attractive catalytic activity, flammability, and non-toxic performance. Unfortunately, the high-migration issue of the ferrocene-based catalysts makes it challenging to store composite solid propellants for a long time. Therefore, a dendrimer containing ferrocene units with anti-migration ability was designed herein. The introduction of polar groups provides a large number of interaction sites for anti-migration, and no migration of the dendrimer in the propellant was observed after 4 weeks of the aging test. For catalytic performance, the results showed that the thermal decomposition temperature of ammonium perchlorate could be reduced from 404°C to 369°C by adding 3 wt% ferrocene-based dendrimer. Moreover, compared with the propellant mixed with Catocene, the propellant containing ferrocene-based dendrimer showed a lower pressure exponent (0.47) and a higher burning rate (2.03 mm·s⁻¹, at 0.1 MPa).