Insensitive high explosives: IV. Nitroguanidine - Initiation & detonation

This paper reviews the detonative properties of low bulk density (LBD), high bulk density (HBD) Nitroguanidine (NGu)(1), CAS-No: [556-88-7] and 82 explosive formulations based on NGu reported in the public domain. To rank the performance of those formulations they are compared with 15 reference compositions containing both standard high explosives such as octogen (HMX)(2), hexogen (RDX)(3), pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN)(4), 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT)(5) as well as insensitive high explosives such as 3-nitro-1,2,4-triazolone (NTO)(6), 1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene (TATB)(7), 1,1-diamino-2,2-dinitroethylene (FOX-7)(8) and N-Guanylurea dinitramide (FOX 12)(9). NGu based formulations are superior to those based on FOX-12 or TATB and are a close match with FOX-7 based explosives, the latter just having higher Gurney Energies (similar to 10%) and slightly higher detonation pressure (+2%). NGu based explosives even reach up to 78% of the detonation pressure, 82% Gurney energy and up to 95% of detonation velocity of HMX. LBD-NGu dissolves in many melt cast eutectics forming dense charges thereby eliminating the need for costly High Bulk Density NGu. Nitroguanidine based formulations are at the rock bottom of sensitiveness among all the above-mentioned explosives which contributes to the safety of these formulations. The review gives 132 references to the public domain. For a review on the synthesis spectroscopy and sensitiveness of Nitroguanidine see Ref. [1]. (C) 2019 The Author. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of China Ordnance Society.