Efficient initiation performance evaluation of a promising new explosive

The process of evaluating the performance of a new high performance explosive, initially developed on the bench-scale, has historically been logistically- and cost-prohibitive. While a thermochemical computational tool can reasonably-accurately predict performance metrics such as detonation velocity, enthalpy, and the product equation-of-state, we do not yet have a reliable method to predict, using data from small quantities, the shock initiation and detonation curvature performance that result from the highly dynamic physical processes that control that behavior. In fact, it may require kilos of material and cost on the order of 1 million US dollars to acquire the data needed to evaluate those critical performance metrics. Here, we report the evaluation of a promising new explosive formulation having 97% difurazanopyrazine that we observed to have shock initiation performance very similar to PBX 9502. We developed a Pop plot and the unreacted equation-of-state for this material using <100 g of material by employing an efficient optically-diagnosed cut-back plate-impact target, and by invoking the single-curve build-up principle.