(628c) Green Methodologies for Separation of Explosive Components Rdx and Hmx

Explosive compounds with Reduced Sensitivity (RS) or Insensitive Munitions (IM) are desired for reasons of safe loading, pack and assemble operations and to meet the improved performance requirements of the energetics. The two most widely used dense energetic materials are the monocyclic nitramines RDX (1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-hexahydrotriazine,) and HMX (1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetraazacyclooctane). The manufacturing process for these explosives yield a mixture of both RDX and HMX. The sensitivity of the final explosive depends on the composition of RDX and HMX and increases with the composition of HMX. There is a need to selectively separate HMX from the mixture in order to develop RS and IM munitions. This presentation summarizes our research on environmentally benign processes to separate HMX from RDX. The approach was to dissolve the crude RDX and HMX mixture into a suitable solvent and then separate the components. Our approach focused on identifying a suitable solvent to solubilize RDX and HMX and evaluating membrane and chromatographic separation processes.