Preparation and Thermal Stability of Nano-Sized HMX-Based Polymer Bonded Explosives

ABSTRACT

In this study, M-HMX-based PBX (M-HMX-PBX) and N-HMX-based PBX (N-HMX-PBX) were prepared by industrial micron-sized HMX (M-HMX) and nano-sized HMX (N-HMX) via solution-water suspension method, respectively. The critical electronic excitation energy (E_c) of M-HMX particle and N-HMX particles was calculated by combining with field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and Image Pro Plus (IPP) software. Meanwhile, the average critical electron excitation energy ($\overline{E_{\mathrm{C}}}$) of the entire particle group was calculated. Those results shown that $\overline{E_{\mathrm{C}}}$ of N-HMX was higher than that of M-HMX, which indicated that the stability of N-HMX was better than that of M-HMX. In addition, the reaction activation energies (E_a) also indicated that N-HMX and N-HMX-PBX were more stable than M-HMX and M-HMX-PBX, which were calculated by the Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose (KAS) and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa (FWO) methods. The above results explained the reasons for the high thermal decomposition stability of N-HMX-PBX from the micro and macro perspectives. And those provided theoretical basis for exploring the application of N-HMX in improving the thermal stability of HMX-PBX.

KEYWORDS:

• HMX-based PBX
• nano-sized HMX
• critical electronic excitation energy
• reaction kinetics
• thermal stability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, 51606102).