Improved prediction of cylinder test energies

Abstract

Energies delivered at 7 volumes expansion in the cylinder test are well correlated for 16 typical and atypical explosives. The criterion for a typical explosive is that it have approximately 0.40 mole fraction of water vapor in the detonation products. The correlation equation is (V 20) 2 = 0.200 ϕp 0 1.50[1.104 − 0.265 MF(H 2O) ], with ϕ = NM 1 2 Q 1 2 where V 20 is the cylinder wall velocity in mmμs at 20 mm expansion in the 1-in. cylinder test, ϱ 0 is the loading density, N is the number of moles of gaseous detonation products per gram of explosive (calculated by the H 2OCO 2 arbitrary), M is the average molecular weight of the gases, Q is the heat of detonation in cal/g, and MF(H 2O) is the mole fraction of water vapor in the detonation products. For reasons that are not now known, the insensitive explosives TATB and nitroguanidine underperform by about 15% relative to the above equation.