Probability Calculation of Grit-Grit Interaction on a Plastic Bonded Explosive During Glancing Impacts
Recent experiments indicate that frictionally heated grit can act as effective hot spots for the ignition of PBX 9501 (Parker et al. (2013)). The most common mode for hot spot formation is when a piece of grit is dragged by the explosive across a high melting point surface, such as steel. This leads to a hot spot with a temperature of the melting point of the surface. For high melting point surfaces this can be hot enough to lead to ignition. It is believed that an easy way to mitigate this is to use surfaces with low melting points, which means the hot spots formed cannot become hot enough to ignite the explosive during the duration of the impact (Bowden and Gurton (1948)). However, when surfaces have a similar hardness to the PBX (such as many plastics), hot spots of sufficient temperature for ignition can still be formed by the collision of two grit particles, one being dragged by the PBX with the other being stationary on the surface. In order to mitigate the probability of ignition it is desirable to know how clean the work surfaces need to be in order to minimize the acceptable risk of an event. Two cases need to be considered: first, what is probability that a dropped piece of PBX will contact one or more grit particles? This will lead to an estimate of how ”clean” a surface needs to be when working with unmitigated, high-melting point surfaces. Second, what is the probability that a dropped piece of PBX will lead to a collision between two or more grit particles? This will give an estimate how clean a surface needs to be when working with low melting point surfaces.