Iron and Copper Doped Zinc Oxide Nanopowders as a Sensitizer of Industrial Energetic Materials to Visible Laser Radiation.

The development of methods ensuring reliable control over explosive chemical reactions is a critical task for the safe and efficient application of energetic materials. Triggering the explosion by laser radiation is one of the promising methods. In this work, we demonstrate a technique of applying the common industrial high explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) as a photosensitive energetic material by adding zinc oxide nanopowders doped with copper and iron.

Achieving tunable chemical reactivity through photo-initiation of energetic materials at metal oxide surfaces.

Known applications of high energy density materials are impressively vast. Despite this, we argue that energetic materials are still underutilized for common energy purposes due to our inability to control explosive chemical reactions releasing energy from these materials. The situation appears paradoxical as energetic materials (EM) possess massive amounts of energy and, hence, should be most appropriate for applications in many energy-intensive processes.

Photochemistry of the α-Al₂O₃-PETN Interface.

Optical absorption measurements are combined with electronic structure calculations to explore photochemistry of an α-Al₂O₃-PETN interface formed by a nitroester (pentaerythritol tetranitrate, PETN, C₅H₈N₄O12) and a wide band gap aluminum oxide (α-Al₂O₃) substrate. The first principles modeling is used to deconstruct and interpret the α-Al₂O₃-PETN absorption spectrum that has distinct peaks attributed to surface F⁰-centers and surface-PETN transitions. We predict the low energy α-Al₂O₃ F⁰-center-PETN transition, producing the excited triplet state, and α-Al₂O₃ F⁰-center-PETN charge transfer, generating the PETN anion radical.

Topography of photochemical initiation in molecular materials.

We propose a fluctuation model of the photochemical initiation of an explosive chain reaction in energetic materials. In accordance with the developed model, density fluctuations of photo-excited molecules serve as reaction nucleation sites due to the stochastic character of interactions between photons and energetic molecules. A further development of the reaction is determined by a competition of two processes.