Determining the temperature to initiate the explosion of a propellant

Summary

Gun propellants are per definition instable substances. During their lifetime a slow decomposition process is going-on. During this decomposition process the heat that is generated accelerates the process, which could result to an unsafe situation, or an unexpected explosion of the material. The temperature to initiate the explosion of a propellant is of importance for the storage conditions of such a substance. The method used so far to evaluate this temperature is based on an extrapolation of the Kissinger equation at zero heating rate. A new proposal is the use of the invariant kinetic parameters (IKP) method to determine the iso-kinetic temperature and extrapolating it to zero heating rate as an alternative method. The results are discussed for some examples.