Micro-Encapsulation Of Nanometric Reactive Particle Mixtures With Explosive Cores

Nanosized reactive materials are being used to enhance traditonal energetic materials in cast explosive or propellant formulations. The small size, however, results in high viscosity of the formulation during mixing. If the nanoreactive material could beencapsulated to form multiple micron particles, and futhermore if explosive materials could be intimately admixed with the nanomaterials during encapsulation, the viscosity problems would be eliminated and the formulation would exhibit enhanced energetics.Gas Anti Solvent Encapsulation will be applied to the microencapsulation of 25nm reactive metal and 1 micron RDX to produce particles on the order of 50 to 200 microns. Tests were carried out to demonstrate the concept and are described in the proposal.The process will be optimized and batches of mocroencapsulated reactive metal/RDX composite particles will be delivered to AFRL. Successful completion of Phase I and Phase II programs will have demonstrated that microencapsulation of reactive metal/explosive composite particles to multimicron size, and delivery of batches for testing, will result in reduced viscosity problems whenthe material is incorporated into formulations. The data on enhanced properties of these formulations will proliferate to the commercial sector where more energetic explosive having potentially longer duration release will be valuable in construction andmining operations. It is also anticipated that there will be applications for this encapsulation process in other industries including pharmaceuticals and foods.