Brazilian disk compression testing of plastic-bonded idoxuridine mock explosive

Recently, there has been increased interest in developing new inert surrogate materials, or “mocks,” for plastic-bonded explosives (PBX). Idoxuridine (IDOX) has similar density and mechanical behavior to the explosive HMX, and formulated plastic-bonded IDOX showed promise for emulating the HMX-based PBX 9501 in preliminary mechanical experiments. Several improvements to the manufacture of plastic-bonded IDOX have been made and are characterized here by Brazilian Disk testing. Compression tests were performed on these disk specimens under quasi-static loading conditions and at three different temperatures, −15∘C, 23∘C, and 50∘C. The full-field deformation over the sample surface during the compression was obtained using the optical digital image correlation (DIC) technique. In this article, we summarize the Brazilian disk compression test results of the 2020 batch of IDOX mock specimens. We present the overall response, as well as the local deformation measurement. We discuss in detail, the sequence of deformation events occurring in the disk specimen during the compression process. Elastic constants, including shear modulus, Young’s modulus, and Poisson’s ratio, of the IDOX mock material, are extracted from the Brazilian disk compression test data. Finally, we compare the Brazilian disk compression test results with the data obtained from the baseline PBX 9501, tested in 2007, as well as the data from a previous batch of IDOX mock material tested in 2017. We hope that such comparisons would point out the path of improvement for the formulation and pressing of the new IDOX mock.