Calcium Nitrate Water Gel?
There's a "Calcium Nitrate 15.5-0-0" fertilizer that's available OTC in the united states. It's essentially a co-crystal of 5 Ca(NO3).NH4NO3.10H2O. so
about 76% calcium nitrate, 16.7% water, and 7.3% ammonia nitrate by mass. This composition can supposedly be mixed with 20% methanol, and 5% water to
create a solution with a "fudge point" below freezing, according to US patent US3765967. I calculated this mixture has about 2.85kJ/gm of energy, but
I'm not sure if it would really detonate, that patent didn't test it and mostly focused on sodium perchlorate solutions.
US patent 3899374 tests a variety of calcium nitrate compositions, but only a few of them have straight calcium nitrate or the co-crystal I mentioned
above as the only oxidizer. They seemed to get detonation after mixing it with formamide, or with ethylene glycol, but then again they used around a
200gm charge with a 37gm pentolite booster. I don't know if these mixtures would actually propagate a detonation into a larger charge volume. They
didn't try a composition using methanol as the fuel, and the calcium nitrate fertilizer as the sole ozidizer. I believe methanol would work more
effectively than these other fuels because it is such an effective solvent for calcium nitrate. Mixing the components at the molecular level should,
at least theoretically, create a huge improvement, and also remove the need for any kind of milling or emulsifying of the ingredients.
I don't have anything good to use as a booster, and I don't have a licence or a good place to test hundreds of gm of HE even if I did have a
satisfactory booster. I can, however, test for solubility and figure out details of creating sensitization voids, gelling agents, etc. I also can
calculate theoretical energy release. If I find a mixture that is near oxygen balance, has an energy density comparable to commercial AN emulsions,
and has most of the fuel and oxidizer in solution, then I will either do what it takes to prepare a test, or at least share the information on here so
other people can "try out" the composition.
For my first test, I put 10g of the calcium nitrate-water-AN co-crystal (from here on described as calcium nitrate fertilizer, CNF) and 2.57gm of
methyl alcohol into a plastic bottle. I shook it, left it standing for hours, and maybe 50% of the CNF dissolved.
I heated it until the MeOH started to boil and the bottle bulged slightly. This dissolved slightly more CNF, but again, not all of it. Once it cooled,
some of it re-crystallized again, showing I now had a saturated solution.
Next, I added .7gm water and this allowed more of the CNF to dissolve. Reheating it now dissolved almost all of it. when it cooled, the solution was
full of crystals about a millimeter across. At this point, I realized that the "fudge point" the patent described was not the point where the mixture
started to precipitate, but the moment where the entire mass became to stiff to stir.
I still believe that having even 50% of the oxidizer in the liquid state will help with detonability, so I decided to try thickening it with guar gum.
The guar gum particles distributed through the solution but didn't dissolve in it. I believe the calcium kept them from dissolving. Ill give updates
int this thread.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
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