A Short Review about Aerospace Materials Characterization - Bonding Agents and Thermal Insulation

This paper is a review about the types of bonding agents used in propellants, as well as the main polymeric matrices used in thermal insulation applied in the rocket engines studied throughout the last decades. This paper aims to show the importance both of the bonding agents in the composition of the propellant and of the thermal insulation coating the rocket engine, which is in contact with the propellant grain. This paper also shows many researchers have been applied, in different spectral regions, techniques as Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), to characterization both the bonding agent and the thermal insulation, which suggests that it may be a future trend the use of Infrared Spectroscopy in studies about bonding agents and the polymeric matrix of the thermal insulation employed in rocket engines.