Investigation on the foaming behaviors of NC-based gun propellants

To prepare the porous NC-based (nitrocellulose-based) gun propellants, the batch foaming process of using supercritical CO2 as the physical blowing agent is used. The solubilities of CO2 in the single-base propellants and TEGDN (trimethyleneglycol dinitrate) propellants are measured by the gravimetric method, and SEM (scanning electron microscope) is used to observe the morphology of foamed propellants. The result shows that a large amount of CO2 could be dissolved in NC-based propellants. The experimental results also reveal that the energetic plasticizer TEGDN exerts an important influence on the pore structure. The triaxial tensile failure mechanism for solid-state nucleation is used to explain the nucleation of NC-based propellants in the solid state. Since some specific foaming behaviors of NC-based propellants can not be explained by the failure mechanism, a solid-state nucleation mechanism which revises the triaxial tensile failure mechanism is proposed and discussed.