Research Facility
Plastic Bonded Explosives
H. Tan, Y. Huang, C. Liu and P.H. Geubelle, 2005. The Mori–Tanaka method for composite materials with nonlinear interface debonding. International Journal of Plasticity, 21, 1890-1918.
Funding support
- U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Defense/Office of Land Warfare & Munitions under the Joint DoD/DOE Munitions Technology Development Program
- ASCI Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at the University of Illinois supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through the University of California under Subcontract No. B523819
- ONR (U.S. Office of Naval Research) Composites for Marine Structures Program (Grant No. N00014-01-1-0205, Program Manager Y. D. S. Rajapakse)
PBX 9501
The high explosive PBX 9501 can be viewed as a composite material composed of 92.7 vol% HMX (energetic) crystals and 7.3 vol% of polymeric binder. The polymeric binder consists of 50% Estane and 50% nitroplasticizer. Estane is segmented block copolymer of polyester and polyurethane, with good adhesion properties. Fig. 1(a) shows the microstructure of PBX 9501, which has a very wide spectrum of size distribution of HMX crystals in order to achieve such a high volume fraction. The size distribution of HMX in PBX 9501, as shown in Fig. 1(b), displays a bimodal distribution with average size of large particles around 250mm and small particles around 8mm. In fact, PBX 9501 is mixed with coarse particles (radii ~125mm) and fine particles (radii ~4mm) with the 3:1 volume ratio. The volume fractions of the coarse and fine particles are therefore 69.5 and 23.2 vol%, respectively.
