Thermal analysis of high-temperature fast reactions in energetic materials

To get round two main difficulties of the kinetic study of fast reactions of high-temperature decomposition of energetic materials (EM) (spatial non-isothermality and self-inflammation) two new methods for sample preparation called “mechanical dilution” and “thermal dilution” were applied. In the first part of the presentation, some experimental and theoretical data on kinetics of fast high-temperature decomposition of some typical homogeneous and heterogeneous energetic materials (including pyroxylin, ammonia copper chromate, ammonium perchlorate, solid rocket propellants, and others) are given. In a number of cases, kinetic constants of fast reactions dominating at high temperatures were shown to significantly differ from those of low-temperature reactions. The second part of the presentation deals with a new method of thermal analysis—electrothermal analysis (ETA). By using a multi-channel high-speed optical pyrometer, variation of the temperature field in an electrically heated sample of conductive energetic material (or its mixture with metal powder) during its heating followed by thermal explosion is registered. Due to application of this method in the ETA-100 (allowing one to measure kinetic data at the temperature up to 3800 K with a time step as short as 0.1 ms, i.e., for full conversion times as short as 10⁻³ s) some important patterns of mechanisms of gasless combustion and explosion in SHS-mixtures (Si + C, Ni + Al, and Ti + C) were identified. More details regarding these and some additional important aspects can be found in 1, 2].