Thermal hazard evaluation of N-guanylurea dinitramide (GUDN) by using kinetic-based simulation approach

Abstract

To promote the practical application of N-guanylurea dinitramide (GUDN), it is necessary to identify the thermal kinetics and evaluate thermal hazards of GUDN under various environmental conditions. In this study, we present that the thermal decomposition of GUDN is a typical autocatalytic reaction and the model-based kinetics was established by simultaneous fitting of a series of nonisothermal DSC data at different heating rates, which can be described as a generalized autocatalytic model, expressed as $$\frac{{{\text{d}}\alpha }}{{{\text{d}}t}} = 2.29 \times 10^{23} \exp \left( { - 225240/RT} \right)\left( {1 - \alpha } \right)^{1.76} \left( {\alpha^{1.47} + 0.59{\text{e}}^{ - 18300{\text{RT}}} } \right)$$. The reaction model exhibits a reasonable fitting to the experimental results with a high correlation coefficient R2 of 0.9994. Based on the established kinetic model, important thermal safety indicators, such as the time to conversion limit, adiabatic time to maximum rate, and self-accelerating decomposition temperature, were simulated, providing important basis concerning the thermal hazard of GUDN in practical applications.