Sciencemadness Discussion Board

NM/PETN mixture

NUKE - 19-11-2006 at 13:17

I was thinking about that potential mixture. But i heard from my friend that the nitrosolvents makes PETN unstable. Do you think is it worth of trying that mixture?

sorry for my english it isn't very good:(

Kray - 30-11-2006 at 05:33

IMO better use pure PETN.

NUKE - 7-12-2006 at 05:28

I can make a lot of PETN so i don't see a problem why i shoudn't experiment with it;)

ZoSo357 - 18-12-2006 at 11:20

I could make a lot of mustard gas if I wanted to, but should I play around with it?

It'd be very well advised to get some good information before doing something like experimenting with something that could be unstable. Sometime's "do first, ask later" isn't the best route nuke.

Remember, you're experimenting with materials that are just waiting to take your life if the oppertunity exists.

research a little, and try to keep all your limbs, K?

[Edited on 18-12-2006 by ZoSo357]

Waffles - 18-12-2006 at 14:05

Quote:
Originally posted by ZoSo357
It'd be very well advised to get some good information before doing something like experimenting with something that could be unstable.
...
research a little, and try to keep all your limbs, K?


That's exactly what he's doing by checking with us here. Trying to get information and research. "Good information," as you say, about mixtures especially of energetic materials such as these- not exactly public library material, you agree? And of course, when you use information from faceless Internet archives, you are certainly playing with fire, assuming you could find any in the first place.
I would say that one of the BEST ways to "research a little" is by directly asking a collective of people with a relative degree of experience (and not experienced in a controlled military/industrial setting, in a PERSONAL way, the same context from which he is asking) with this sort of thing.

Long story short, everyone here has heard plenty enough warnings and horror stories about high explosives. If you don't have anything useful to contribute, stop trying to mother him.

nitro-genes - 18-12-2006 at 16:18

NM isn't acidic or otherwise reactive enough to cause any decomposition fast enough to become dangerous, in fact NM is surprisingly stable and is used as a solvent in several organic reactions. Even with nitric acid there is no noticable exothermic reaction and mixtures of NM and nitric acid have been proposed as a commercial binary explosive. So the main decomposition producs of PETN, like HNO3, NO2 and NO are not going to have an dramatic effect on the NM at all...
Recrystallized and neutralized PETN is very stable anyway, going for several decades until decomposition becomes even noticable. Although not from my own experience, even mixtures of more unstable nitroesters, like NG or EGDN and NM, supposedly are no more unstable than NG or EGDN alone...
To be completely sure though, I wouldn;t store these mixtures for too long, especially when heavily confined or in larger amounts. The extreme volatility of NM and the solvent action on PETN would limit storage ability anyway...

[Edited on 19-12-2006 by nitro-genes]

ZoSo357 - 18-12-2006 at 17:24

Waffler, what i meant wasn't meant to seem saucy, but it was directed towards his last post in which he said "I can make a lot of PETN so i don't see a problem why i shoudn't experiment with it" which i just meant that even though he can just experiment with it, that he should wait before just jumping into it, since the last post before his last one wasn't totally answering his question. sorry for the confusion.