A Novel Method for Quantifying The Sensitivity of a Non-Ideal Explosive

High costs and safety risks are incurred when large-scale characterization tests on non-ideal explosives are performed, and may not be feasible with some explosives due to the lack of available material required to sustain a steady detonation. The physics governing a detonation failure event, which will occur if the diameter of an explosive charge is below the critical diameter, and it\u27s relationship to mechanisms of initiation have not been fully explored. An understanding of this relationship may increase the ability to predict the behavior of explosives using only a few grams per test of the given material for characterization. Here, experiments in which detonation failure in non-ideal ammonium nitrate based explosives occur are observed in order to explore the relationship between rate of failure and the shock sensitivity of an explosive. Microwave interferometry is used to measure the rate of detonation failure in AN-based explosives doped with various sizes of aluminum particles or solid glass beads, and it is observed that the rate of detonation failure has a relationship with aluminum particle size. The size of glass beads at this mixture ratio appears to have no eect on the rate of detonation failure, and it is concluded that the contribution of aluminum to the failing reaction wave is chemically dominated