Development and Qualification of an Optimized Low Voltage/Energy Exploding Foil Initiator (EFI) Using CL-20 Explosive

Current Exploding Foil Initiators (EFI's) utilize explosive powder HNS-IV for initiation. HNS-IV has numerous problems, including being extremely expensive; having a base material which is no longer manufactured in the United States; is manufactured at a DOE facility with extremely long manufacturing time frames and limited success in DOD specification conformance; and having explosive output performance that is less than desirable. Explosive powder CL-20 is potentially an excellent replacement for HNS-IV in terms of cost, availability, environmental concerns, and performance. RSI proposes to investigate CL-20 based explosive formulations in order to determine what characteristics are required to have a CL-20 formulation react to the EFI initiation as successfully as an HNS-IV pellet, ideally with more significant output. RSI has been working with low-voltage EFI designs for a couple of years, and would be able to adapt ongoing work in HNS-IV pellet initiation designs to a CL-20 pellet initiation design, once the powder/pellet configuration was established.