Understanding explosive sensitivity

Explosives have an inherent problem - they should be perfectly safe for handling and storage but detonate reliably on demand. Using computer modeling and a novel molecule design technique, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have replaced one “arm” of an explosive molecule to help unravel the first steps in the detonation process and better understand its sensitivity — how easily it begins a violent reaction.

“It started out with, can we take a common initiating explosive PentaErythritol TetraNitrate (PETN) and replace parts of it to change sensitivity properties,” said explosives chemist Virginia Manner. “So we replaced an arm of PETN with various non-energetic groups to see how those different groups could change the sensitivity of the overall molecule. This is the first time we've taken a fundamental system like this and changed different parts of it to see how it could affect sensitivity.”

The research was published April 18, 2018 in Chemical Science the “flagship journal” for the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The researchers were able to change the sensitivity of the PETN-type materials, making them both less sensitive and more sensitive. PETN was invented in Germany in 1894, is one of the more powerful explosive materials, and is typically used only in small quantities due to its relatively high sensitivity.