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

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 ((E-C) over bar) of the entire particle group was calculated. Those results shown that (E-C) over bar 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.