China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Explosives and Propellants: Power to Breach Mountains, Wage war and Visit the Moon
Published in Richard J. Sundberg, The Chemical Century, 2017
Plastic explosives are mixture of secondary explosives with flexible binding material that also serves as fuel. The materials have the advantage of being able to be molded in place for particular applications. The plastic explosives also tend to be highly stable to handling and resistant to accidental detonation. They are used both in military and civilian applications. They use either nitrate esters or nitramines as the main explosive. The most common current plastic explosive, referred to as C-4, contains about 90% RDX, 5–6% plasticizer, 2% polyisobutylene binder, and 1.5% fuel oil. Another widely used plastic explosive, Semtex, is manufactured by the Czech company Explosia. It contains a mixture of PETN (50–75%), RDX (5–40%), a styrene–butadience polymer (9%), and a plasticizer (8–9%). The plasticizers for both C-4 and Semtex are diesters such as dioctyl adipate or dioctyl phthalate. As we will learn in Section 1.6, Semtex attained notoriety as an explosive of terrorists.
Improvised Explosive Devices' and Suicide Bombers
Published in Robert A. Burke, Counter-Terrorism for Emergency Responders, 2017
Plastic explosive is a soft and hand-moldable solid form of explosive material. Within the field of explosives engineering, plastic explosives are also known as putty explosives. Plastic explosives are especially suited for explosive demolition. Common plastic explosives include Semtex and C-4. Plastic explosives are especially suited for explosive demolition of obstacles and fortifications by engineers and combat engineers as they can be easily formed into the best shapes for cutting structural members and have a high enough velocity of detonation and density for metal cutting work.
Right on target: using plants and microbes to remediate explosives
Published in International Journal of Phytoremediation, 2019
Elizabeth L. Rylott, Neil C. Bruce
An additional class of explosives, nitrate esters, contain NO2 groups bonded to an oxygen atom attached to an aliphatic carbon and include pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), glyceryl trinitrate (GTN; nitroglycerin), and ethylene glycol dinitrates (EGDN). The GTN is used by the military in munition propellants, and more widely by construction, demolition, and mining industries, EGDN is used to reduce the freezing temperature of the nitroglycerin component of dynamite. PETN is used in plastic explosives such as Semtex. PETN is toxic to plants and animals (Hawari 2014), and the medical use of GTN as a vasodilator in humans demonstrates it has biological activity. These nitrate esters also persist in the environment, and often as co-pollutants with explosives such as TNT (Arbeli et al. 2016). Although nitrate ester detoxification pathways have been described for bacteria, fungi and plants, along with some remediation studies (Rylott, Lorenz, et al. 2011), there has been little progress in bioremediation strategies in the last decade.