Self-healing improves the stability and safety of polymer bonded explosives

Abstract Polymer-bonded explosives (PBXs) are often subjected to different external environmental conditions with various temperature and humidity during long-term storage, transportation, and usage process. The change in temperature and humidity will result in PBXs cracks formation and cause higher risk of explosion evolution when undergoing various stimulus including impact or friction. Herein, a self-healing polymer binder is developed to solve this problem. The fluoropolymer gel binder, a PVDF-co-HFP (copolymer of CH2-CF2 and CF2-CF(CF3))/EMIOTf (1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoromethanesulfonate)/graphene ternary composite, has high density, high thermal conductivity, excellent interfacial adhesion property, and exhibits self-healing ability at room temperature. Highly filled PBXs composites with 95% of explosive 2, 6-diamino-3, 5-dinitropyrazine-1-oxide (LLM-105) and 5% of ternary composite are fabricated. The as-prepared PBX samples have high denotation parameter (7800 m s−1), low impact sensitivities (11–12 J), and low friction sensitivity (no sparks was observed even at friction energy load of 0.36 N). More importantly, our PBXs have effective crack healing ability within 48 h at room temperature. Therefore, the stability and safety of PBXs are improved through the self-healing polymer binder. Such PBXs can find widespread application in various military and civil fields.