Thermal Decomposition and Ignition of PBXN-110 Plastic-Bonded Explosive

Due to safety requirements, insensitive behavior in slow or fast thermal heating (cook-off) conditions is a desired behavior for todays munitions. The ignition time of munitions under slow or fast cook-off conditions is an important parameter in the design of insensitive munitions. The critical temperature, which mainly depends on the chemical, physical, and the geometrical properties of the energetic material, is the determining factor whether the material will end up with thermal initiation or not, when it is exposed to an external heat source. In this study a slow cook-off test setup is designed and developed and the tests for a generic munition containing PBXN-110 plastic-bonded explosive are performed in order to obtain temperature distribution in the test item, ignition time, ignition temperature, and ignition location. In this paper the development procedure and the experimental results of the slow cook-off tests are explained. Moreover, the kinetic parameters such as activation energy and pre-exponential factor for the plastic-bonded explosive obtained from the TGA tests are presented.