Thermal behavior of nitrocellulose with different aging periods

Abstract

To further understand the aging process of energetic materials such as nitrocellulose (NC), aging treatment of NC samples was performed by a constant temperature chamber and non-isothermal experiments were performed by a TG-DSC analyzer. Also, scanning electron microscope was utilized to detect the morphological changes of NC in different forms. The results revealed that, with the increasing aging time, the decomposition properties including mass loss, decomposition temperature, heat production rate and heat of decomposition exhibit significantly different trends for the two forms of NC. Furthermore, the thermal kinetic parameters of pure NC were calculated based on Kissinger method. It is found that pure NC has the highest thermal instability at the aging time of 24 days under the aging temperature of 90 °C, and the stability of NC will increase when the aging time exceeds 32 days.