Exploration of Differences in Anti-static Ability of Various Explosives

Abstract. From the experimental perspective, this study selected typical explosives from commonly used initiating explosives, booster explosives, and main explosives for electrostatic sensitivity tests. The reasons for these different results were analyzed and discussed from various perspectives, including the molecular composition of the samples, the duration of electric field action, the time difference between voltage and current peaks, thermal effect，etc. The initiating explosive selected was lead azide, the booster explosive was PETN, the main explosives included four types: TNT and PBXs separately based on RDX, HMX, and TATB. The experimental design simulated actual application conditions, with lead azide directly subjected to electrostatic sensitivity tests using detonators, while the other five explosives were pressed into small sheet (tablets) samples for testing. The test results showed that when subjected to a stimulus energy of 0.156 J, lead azide exploded, whereas the other five samples did not. Even when the stimulus energy was increased to high-energy 3.430 J or 6.000 J, the other samples still did not exploded. Under high-energy conditions, after repeated stimulation (40 or 100 times), the surfaces of the explosive samples showed discoloration, but no sustained burning or deflagration was observed. The test result photographs are shown in Figures 1-5, and the gap voltage and current waveforms are shown in Figure 6.