Experimental and theoretical study of the detonation of granular explosives – ATOLE

The ATOLE project aims at studying the underlying mechanisms involved in the detonation of oxygen-deficient explosives with granular structure.
These still barely understood processes produce large quantities of solid carbon particles, among which a non-negligible part of nanodiamonds which size-distribution is rather narrow and peaks at diameters of a few nanometres.
The formation of this carbon soot has two major consequences. First it results from (and therefore testifies for) the decomposition mechanisms in the reaction zone of the explosive, and complexifies our understanding of the thermodynamic behaviour of the detonation gas in the release phase, which is crucial to model the interaction of the explosive with the surrounding materials/environment. Second it is widely used to synthesize nanodiamonds which properties are of great interest to a number of industrial and defence applications.

Recent works at the NS3E laboratory show that the properties of the nanodiamonds synthesized through shock compression depend substantially on the structure of the detonated explosive, for instance its granularity. Meanwhile, CEA-DAM has been developing for the last ten years a number of simulation tools and methodologies designed to reach the relevant time and length scales for these types of processes. The aim is to finely model the behaviour of explosives upon detonation using multi-scale approaches.

The goal of this project is to combine the experimental and theoretical capabilities of NS3E and CEA-DAM in order to unravel and improve the models for the behaviour of granular explosives undergoing shock-compression. In fine we aim at rationalising the relationship between the structure of the explosive and the properties of the synthesized nanodiamonds.