Determination of the performances of explosive and explosive mixtures by thermodynamic approaches

Explosives are high-energy materials and controlling of their performances are critical for both military and industrial applications. In this work, the performance properties of various high-energy explosives and their mixtures were evaluated using thermodynamic approaches. Heat of explosion, volume of gaseous products after the explosion, power of explosive, TNT equivalence, maximum temperature that the reaction can reach, detonation velocity and detonation pressure were determined in the scope of performance properties. For this purpose, initially, possible explosion reactions of the explosives were proposed by applying Kistiakowsky-Wilson (KW), Springall-Roberts (SR) and Kamlet-Jacobs (KJ) principles. Heat values of the proposed explosion reactions were calculated from standard formation enthalpies of the reaction components. Volumes of the gaseous formed after explosion were calculated from mole numbers of gaseous products come out from the reactions. Power of the explosives was calculated based on heat of explosion and volume of gaseous products after the explosion. The results were deviated depending on the method used and some of the explosive mixtures such as RDX/CL-20, HMX/ONC, and ONC/TKX-50 showed higher power values that that of themselves single explosive components. On the other hand, it has also been observed that power of the explosives is related to the detonation velocity and detonation pressure. Moreover, effect of addition of certain amounts of aluminum (Al) to the explosives on the power was investigated. The calculations showed that the addition of some amount of Al to the secondary explosives increases the power of the explosive.