Thermal Data of Perfluorinated Carboxylic Acid Functionalized Aluminum Nanoparticles

Nathan J. Weeks, Bradley Martin, Enrique Gazmin and Scott T. Iacono ()
Additional contact information
Nathan J. Weeks: Laboratories for Advanced Materials, Department of Chemistry, Chemistry Research Center, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO 80 840, USA
Bradley Martin: Laboratories for Advanced Materials, Department of Chemistry, Chemistry Research Center, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO 80 840, USA
Enrique Gazmin: Laboratories for Advanced Materials, Department of Chemistry, Chemistry Research Center, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO 80 840, USA
Scott T. Iacono: Laboratories for Advanced Materials, Department of Chemistry, Chemistry Research Center, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO 80 840, USA

Data, 2022, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Improving the performance of composite energetic materials comprised of a solid metal fuel and a source of oxidizer (known as thermites) has long been pursued as thermites for pyrolant flares and rocket propellants. The performance of thermites, involving aluminum as the fuel, can be dramatically improved by utilizing nanometer-sized aluminum particles (nAl) leading to vastly higher reaction velocities, owing to the high surface area of nAl. Despite the benefits of the increased surface area, there are still several problems inherent to nanoscale reactants including particle aggregation, and higher viscosity composited materials. The higher viscosity of nAl composites is cumbersome for processing with inert polymer binder formulations, especially at the high mass loadings of metal fuel necessary for industry standards. In order to improve the viscosity of high mass loaded nAl energetics, the surface of the nAl was passivated with covalently bound monolayers of perfluorinated carboxylic acids (PFCAs) utilizing a novel fluorinated solvent washing technique. This work also details the quantitative binding of these monolayers using infrared spectroscopy, in addition to the energetic output from calorimetric and thermogravimetric analysis.

Keywords: energetics; pyrolants; fluorine; nanoaluminum; carboxylic acids; nanoparticles; metal fuels; oxidizers; calorimetry; monolayer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 C80 C81 C82 C83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/8/1/5/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/8/1/5/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jdataj:v:8:y:2022:i:1:p:5-:d:1012418

Access Statistics for this article

Data is currently edited by Ms. Cecilia Yang

More articles in Data from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().