STUDY OF THE GAS-PHASE CHEMISTRY OF RDX - EXPERIMENTS AND MODELING

The objectives of this work were to identify the species produced duri ng the CO2 laser-induced decomposition of 1,3,5-trinitrohexahydro-s-tr iazine (RDX) and to obtain species profiles in the gas-phase during la ser-assisted combustion for comparison to a one-dimensional model of t he flame, In the experiments, a microprobe/mass spectrometer system wa s used to measure quantitative gas-phase species profiles and a high-m agnification video system was used to observe surface behavior and fla me structure, Gas-phase species evolved from the surface and also insi de a bubble were measured. The species identified at the surface were HCN, NO2, H2O, NO, CO, N2O, N-2, and H-2; no CO2 was found at the surf ace. Formaldehyde may have been present, but it could not be unambiguo usly identified. Species mole fractions measured at 1.0 atm and a heat flux of 400 W/cm(2) were used as input to a one-dimensional model alo ng with a temperature profile obtained from the literature for similar experimental conditions. In order to obtain reasonable agreement betw een the model and the experiments for stable species, RDX vapor had to be added to the initial species for the model calculations. However, even with this addition, the profiles for OH and NH did not match data available in the literature.