An efficient energy characteristics and explosion heat improving method of FOX-7-based aluminized explosives

Abstract Exploring new composite explosives based on 1,1-diamino-2,2-dinitroethylene (FOX-7) is significant in the field of insensitive high explosives (IHE). Despite having good detonation performance compared to RDX, FOX-7 has not been successfully applied in the preparations of aluminized explosives due to the poor explosion heat values. In this paper, the explosion heat and detonation velocity of FOX-7-based aluminized explosives were studied systematically. The experiment results showed that the explosion heat of FOX-7-based aluminized explosives are significantly lower than that of RDX-based ones, especially when the content of aluminum powder exceeds 30%. To solve this problem, a simple but effective method of adding RDX to FOX-7-based aluminized explosives was developed, leading to a huge growth of explosion heat values. Finally, in order to compare the safety performance with RDX-based aluminized explosives, the low vulnerability of the FOX-7/RDX-based aluminized explosives formulation was investigated by fast cook-off, sympathetic detonation and 12.7 mm bullet impact tests. The results showed that the safety performance of FOX-7/RDX-based aluminized explosives is better than that of RDX-based aluminized explosives, proving that good low vulnerability is kept with the addition of RDX into FOX-7-based aluminized explosives.