1 UNDERSTANDING AND PREDICTING THE THERMAL EXPLOSION VIOLENCE OF HMX-BASED AND RDX-BASED EXPLOSIVES – EXPERIMENTAL MEASUREMENTS OF MATERIAL PROPERTIES AND REACTION VIOLENCE

The violence of thermal explosions with energetic materials is affected by many material properties, in-cluding mechanical and thermal properties, thermal ignition kinetics, and deflagration behavior. These properties must be characterized for pristine and thermally-damaged materials. We present available data for these properties for two HMX-based formulations – LX-04 and PBX-9501, and two RDX-based formulations – Composition B and PBXN-109. We draw upon separately-published data on the thermal explosion violence with these materials to compare the material properties with the observed violence. We have the most extensive data on deflagration behavior of these four formulations, and we discuss the correlation of the deflagration data with the violence results. The data reported here may also be used to develop models for application in simulation codes such as ALE3D to calculate and predict thermal ex-plosion violence