Internal Ballistics of Solid-Fuel Rockets.

Subtitled Military Rockets Using Dry-processed Double-base Propellant as Fuel, by R. N. Wimpress of Industrial Engineers, Inc., “formerly associated with Contract OEMsr-418 of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, California Institute of Technology,” with a preface by B. H. Sage, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Caltech. The title page states “First Edition” (McGraw-Hill, 1950); later editions do not carry the notice.

Sage’s preface, dated Pasadena, March 1950, explains that the text was written in late 1945 and early 1946 from the work of the Propellants Group of the Caltech rocket program, credits C. C. Lauritsen and W. A. Fowler for defining its objectives and E. C. Watson for the coordination, and notes that no bibliography is given because more confidential material would be involved. Only rockets using dry-processed double-base propellants are treated in detail.

The chapters cover internal versus external ballistics, the characteristics of propellant gases, the burning properties of propellants, steady-state flow of compressible fluids, nozzle performance, flow of gas inside rocket motors and the determination of reaction pressures, with numbered tables, charts and photographs of propellant grains.