Determination of the time to ignition for samples from pressed tetranitropentaerythritol

The article deals with the problem of determining the time to ignition for explosive tetranitropentaerythritol (TEN) under thermal exposure. TEN belongs to the class of nitroester explosives, which are characterized by low temperature resistance. The simplest thermal decomposition model, the simple autocatalysis model, was chosen for this explosive. This model describes the main aspects of thermal decomposition of nitroesters - the catalytic effect of decomposition products on the decomposition rate of the initial explosive. Based on the selected model, a method is proposed for determining kinetic parameters using known experimental data on static heating of spherical samples of compressed heating elements. This method includes two stages. At the first stage, kinetic parameters are preliminarily estimated using the expression for the induction period. Then these parameters are significantly refined during numerical calculations. An Arrhenius dependence of the activation energy on temperature is proposed to describe the entire set of experimental data. Using the obtained set of kinetic parameters and the selected thermal decomposition model, the results of experiments on dynamic heating of cylindrical heating element samples are satisfactorily described.