Preparation and characterization of nano-CoNiCu ferrite for thermolysis of modified insensitive energetic material nitrotriazolone (NTO)

Abstract

The present research aims to prepare transition metallic ferrite CoNiCuFe2O4 (CNCF) nanoparticles and its catalytic effects on thermal decomposition of 3-nitro-1,2,4-triazol-5-one or Nitrotriazolone (NTO) and nano-NTO studied by various physico-chemical characterization tools such as powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), Raman spectroscopy (RS), UV–visible spectroscopy (UV–vis), and thermogravimetric analysis-differential scanning calorimetry-differential thermal analysis (TG-DSC-DTA). For a comparison purpose, the catalytic activity of NTO + CNCF and nNTO + CNCF mixtures was evaluated using thermal analysis with different heating rates and their kinetics were studied. The obtained results indicated that nNTO + CNCF exhibited lower decomposition temperature than the pure NTO, nNTO, and NTO + CNCF. Moreover, kinetic results show that the activation energy and the pre-exponential factor were considerably lowered in the presence of catalyst. Thus, the synthesized energetic compound and catalyst could be applied for the development of chemical propulsion formulations and their co-crystals.

Keywords

• 3-Nitro-1,2,4-triazol-5-one or nitrotriazolone (NTO)
• Nano-NTO
• Catalyst
• High energy materials
• Thermodynamics
• Kinetics