However, it is unlikely that one of the compounds will replace TNT anytime soon. Nevertheless, Sabatini hopes their work will inspire others. L M Barton et al, J. By running their famous experiment in glass flasks, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey might have unintentionally simulated the role of rocks on early Earth.
One chemistry professor received three months for producing the drug in a university lab, while another was acquitted. Site powered by Webvision Cloud. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. Source: Shutterstock. References L M Barton et al, J. These pollutants can get into soil and water supplies, and TNT, due to its high vapor pressure, has a tendency to produce air pollutants that can harm workers melting down the material with steam.
It's also not that explosive, owing to the fact that TNT doesn't have enough oxidizer to burn all its carbon and hydrogen fuel, which is why you see a black cloud of mostly carbon after TNT is detonated. But RDX also produces pollutants that can seep into groundwater, and they don't decompose easily. They want more power. And TNT is okay Searching for a substitute has been an ongoing effort spanning decades, and in , ARL synthesized a compound with some promising results.
Bis-isoxazole, as the compound is known, proved to be cleaner than TNT and melt-castable, but not as powerful. Working with Los Alamos, the Army set out to tweak the recipe.
Bis-isoxazole consists of two five-atom rings with three carbon atoms, one nitrogen, and one oxygen. By swapping out a carbon atom for another nitrogen, the chemists knew they would produce a compound with a higher explosive yield, though they did not know if it would be melt-castable.
The result was the new molecule that could replace TNT, bis-oxadiazole. The additional nitrogen adds density to the molecule, and removing carbon helps balance out the oxidizer so all of the fuel can be used up to produce energy in the reaction. And once the researchers had synthesized it in the lab, they realized bis-oxadiazole has a melting point around that of TNT, making it melt-castable.
There are two primary ways to measure the power of an explosion: detonation velocity and detonation pressure. According to chemical modeling, bis-oxadiazole should have a detonation velocity of around 8. In order to initiate the explosion, TNT must first be detonated using a pressure wave from another, more easily induced explosion from another explosive called a detonator.
One such detonator is lead azide , Pb N 3 2 , which explodes when struck or if an electric discharge is passed through it. Plastic explosives have been around for a couple of decades. They typically consist of an explosive mixed with an oil or wax plastic resin. One example is C4 plasticized RDX , which has been used by the military and safecrackers! RDX is cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine , another high explosive with a tight, constricted ring structure similar to TNT except containing even more energy-providing N atoms.
Recently, however, a range of plastic explosives have been produced by the Semtin Glassworks in Czechoslovakia now known as VCHZ Synthesia , and were christened Semtex.
Semtex is extremely powerful for its weight, and is harder to detect than other explosives because it has little smell.
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