Characterization

This thrust area addresses the basic question of what makes a chemical capable of being an explosive. Activities include:

  • creation of tests and metrics to identify of explosive precursors;
  • design of protocols and methods to prevent such precursors from being used as illicit explosives, while they remain functional for their intended use;
  • examination of commodity chain handling explosive precursors;
  • determination of physical properties, performance, and safety margins of explosives. Determination of physical properties is basic to the design of explosive detection instrumentation. Some properties may be found in the database http://expdb.chm.uri.edu.
  • characterizing the surface-explosive particle interaction in order to best locate and collect explosive residue.

 

Explosives Characterization Research Team

Team Lead: James (Jim) Smith

Project Overview (flash) or PDF

Determining Vapor Liquid Equilibria

  • Brandon Weeks TTU
  • Louisa Hope-Weeks TTU
  • Choong Shik Yoo WSU

Testing for Precursors Identification

Precursor Denaturing

Modeling of surface-particle interaction

Determining Vapor Liquid Equilibria & Phase Diagrams of Water/H2O2 Binary & Ternary Sys.