The Improvement of Picric Acid Synthesis Methodology

Abstract

Explosives have the greatest importance in human practical activities, not only at time of war, but at tranquility as well. Nowadays, huge amount different type of explosives is synthesized, and fabricated for military and civilian applications. Nevertheless, this fact doesn’t exclude necessity of synthesis of new explosives for optimization of their characteristics, such as prime cost, power, safety during production, storage, transfer and etc. Picric acid is a fairly strong and energetic explosive, at the same time, beside to its explosive properties, it is characterized with antibacterial nature and it is the best yellow dye, especially for dyeing animal and plant tissues. The synthesis of picric acid structural analogues, is the main purpose of the research. One of the reasons of synthesis picric acid and further preparation of its structural analogues is safe nature of substances of this group, which makes them safe to various manipulations. On the other hand, it is well known that the synthesis and production of explosives is classified as high risk and costly technology. Therefore, even a small increase of their production productivity, is interesting from the economic effect point of view. During an investigation, changing of reaction conditions (temperature, concentrations and dosage of reagents) the improved method for syntheses of picric acid was developed. As result the significant increase of practical yield of picric acid, from 46% to 86% was achieved. Synthesized picric acid was placed in steel tube and tested on initiation of detonation in explosive camera. The description of modified method, comparisons to conventional technology, as well as explosion testing results is described in the paper.