In the present investigation, various factors and trends, related to the usage of two or more sets of inert particles comprised of the same material (nominally aluminum) but at different diameters for the suppression of axial shock wave development, are numerically predicted for a composite-propellant cylindrical-grain solid rocket motor. The limit pressure wave magnitudes at a later reference time in a given pulsed firing simulation run are collected for a series of runs at different particle sizes and loading distributions and mapped onto corresponding attenuation trend charts. The inert particles’ presence in the central core flow is demonstrated to be an effective means of instability symptom suppression, in correlating with past experimental successes in the usage of particles. However, the predicted results of this study suggest that one needs to be careful when selecting more than one size of particle for a given motor application. 1. Introduction Over the last number of decades, a multitude of research efforts have been directed towards understanding the physical mechanisms, or at least the surrounding factors, behind the appearance of symptoms typically associated with nonlinear axial combustion instability in solid-propellant rocket motors (SRMs). The principal symptoms are the presence within the motor chamber of stronger finite-amplitude traveling axial pressure waves that may be shock fronted, commonly (although not always) accompanied by some degree of base chamber pressure rise (dc shift). Note that low-magnitude pressure waves due to vortex shedding from segmented/gapped components in the motor chamber are not included (here) in this more traditional category of nonlinear axial instability. Studies of nonlinear axial combustion instability have ranged from numerous experimental test firing series on the one hand [1–3], and linear/nonlinear acoustic theory modeling on the other (largely, the analysis producing frequency-based standing wave solutions for a given chamber geometry, but without some useful quantitative information) [4–7]. On occasion, researchers have employed a numerical modeling approach, to work towards a more comprehensive quantitative understanding of the physics involved (the numerical model producing a traveling wave solution to a limit wave amplitude and corresponding small or larger dc shift, typically a time-based result evolving from an initial pulse disturbance introduced into the chamber flow) [8, 9]. Available computational power and associated result turnaround times commonly forced some simplifications in the
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