The burning rate of rocket propellants is one of the most important parameters having a direct influence on its ballistic characteristics, so accurate measurement of this parameter is an active approach for achieving optimum design of the solid rocket motors.
In this paper, acoustic emission technique was applied for measuring the burning rate of a composite propellant and tests were performed on a wide Pressure range (5 - 9 MPa) at ambient temperature. 3 % as a deviation co-efficient of acoustic emission technique was investigated by comparing the burning rate results obtained by this technique and those obtained by actual burning of a small-scale test motors at 6.894 MPa (1000 PSI) and curves obtained from previously mentioned techniques were analyzed. This paper reports that the acoustic emission technique is a simple, effective, economic, time-saving, reliable technique with a high accuracy nearly equivalent to the active field results and it is suitable for quality control of large-scale productions of composite propellant.