Application of microfluidic technology on preparation of nano LLM-105

ABSTRACT

Current methods, including ball milling and spray drying, are subject to some restrictions in application for preparing nano 2,6-diamino-3,5-dinitropyrazine-1-oxide (LLM-105), such as too large volume of dangerous goods, unstable temperature as well as discontinuous industrial production. In this study, continuous and safe preparation of nano-LLM-105 was achieved using microfluidic technology. Several influence factors had been studied on the particle size of LLM-105 including supersaturation, microreactor structure, solvent/non-solvent ratio, the total flow rate, reactor temperature, as well as the number of plates. Results showed that supersaturation of solution and structure of the microreactor played a critical role in the formation of nano-scale LLM-105. Further analysis on these nano-particles revealed its D50 was 124.95 nm with a spherical-like narrow shape through scanning electron microscopy and particle size distribution curve. X-ray diffraction results show that the crystal structure of nano-LLM-105 has not changed, and the differential scanning calorimeter test results show that nano-LLM-105 still maintains good thermal stability compared to raw-LLM-105. In short, this protocol provides a new route for continuous and safe preparation of nano-level LLM-105, which could be potentially applied to other nano-energetic materials, such as HMX and CL-20.

KEYWORDS:

• Nano LLM-105
• microfluidic technology
• supersaturation
• microreactor structure
• solvent/non-solvent method

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21875109) to provide fund for conducting experiments

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 [No. 21875109].