creator Chen, Xin advisor Nash, Philip The main purpose of this work is to investigate bi and tri-metallic metal com- binations as initiators which require an ability to have a self-sustaining exothermic reaction. Through the reaction, the initiator should achieve a temperature in excess of 500 C when in contact with a thermally conducting surface. Also the initiator must be in the form of a exible wire or strip of the order of one millimeter radius. There are four phases in my MS research project. First was identifying the potential candidate compounds for exothermic reaction. During this phase, I wrote a program using Mathematicar (Appendix A) to calculate the adiabatic temperature resulting from the reaction of di erent binary or ternary elemental combinations. The calculation took into account the speci c heats and any enthalpies of transformation occurring between room temperature and the adiabatic temperature. Based on the results of this program several suitable compositions were selected from three hun- dred candidates. The second phase was determining a methodology to manufacture selfCpropagating thin strips or wires. We attempted several methods including plate rolling, wire twisting, mechanical coating, chemical coating, and powder metallurgy. We successfully obtained self-propagating thin metal strips and wires using powder metallurgy methods. In the third phase, a transparent reaction box was constructed in order to provide a protective atmosphere (Ar gas) and connect to a data acqui- sition system to obtain the reaction temperature, initiation temperature and video materials of reactions. In the last phase, the reacted samples were characterized using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Backscattered Electron detector (BSE), X-ray Di raction (XRD), Di erential scanning calorimeter (DSC), etc. Submitted by Liana Khananashvili (khananashvili@iit.edu) on 2014-10-23T18:09:08Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Xin Chen.pdf: 26917904 bytes, checksum: 2d3962d86be24729a49f125dc59fcfbf (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-23T18:09:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Xin Chen.pdf: 26917904 bytes, checksum: 2d3962d86be24729a49f125dc59fcfbf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05 M.S. in Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering, May 2014 2014 2014-05 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/3299 en Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access MMAE / Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department