Full transcript of “Ammonium Nitrate Based Explosive Compositions”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 somebody was complaining about my uh little headset microphone here they said this audio Fidelity wasn't very good you may have to unsubscribe you may have to you may have to give me a thumbs down sorry cuz we're using this we're using this headset this is what we got thank you for your comment though I'll put it right where it belongs over there in the trash can right there Boop I am so jaded all right let's talk about ammonium nitrate explosives energetic America explosives aren't hard to make guys
0:47 accelerate okay so if you're not familiar with ammonium nitrate explosives traditionally they're going to be used with ammonium nitrate and a fuel the fuel is typically a metal or a fuel oil if you have fuel oil that would be AO if you've ever heard that term AO they're talking about fuel oil most of these mixes are pretty good at heaving they're pretty low velocity you're going to be 2500 m/ second to 3,000 m/s somewhere in there the normal characterization of ammonium nitr explosives is that they're pretty insensitive a lot of times they require boosters to detonate so the standard practice would be to use something like High Velocity Deb cord some type of booster charge TNT or something like that to get enough kick to set off uh the ammonium nitrate charge and get Max velocity out of it so what's the difference between AO and um like
1:32 ammonium nitrate aluminum anal that uh what are the differences between what we're talking about today in those that would be two things number one is going to be sensitivity to a number eight cap uh or stronger in this case we're doing all these charges today are going to be uh we're going to be detonating them with a 1 G pettin base charge which is pretty high power I mean that's a high power cap all these can detonate with a cap they can all detonate with a number eight cap a lot of these can you know they're tested to detonate in their Source literature which is patents most of these are patents but they can detonate as low as as a 600 milligram base charge in a Detonator which is not extremely high power I mean it's just kind of average so to explain how we achieve this the traditional AO is going to be a
2:18 mechanical mixture you know uh one of one of them is in the liquid phase the oil and so you get a little bit more intimate than typical mechanical mixtures but the fuel and the oxidizer constituents they're not as close as they could be right so if we were dealing with like TNT or something like that you got your Nitro groups on the fuel molecule directly connected so it's a very short distance so these are four uh ammonium nitrate based explosives and they all have kind of different properties some of them are going to be cheap to manufacture some of them are going to be expensive some of them are going to be simple and some of them be slightly more complicated they'll range across the Spectrum and um these are the most common that you'll see online if you start to get into it but they're the the most basic explosives that you can
3:03 basically make additionally these compositions they have um you know special properties they're either going to be intimate between the fuel and oxidizer because uh you know in some cases we're dealing with metal complex secondary explosives and other cases we're dealing with co- crystallization so co- crystallization um it's it's more intimate than a mechanical mixture these also have uh melt cast properties so these can you act as a melt cast carrier you can cast them into shapes and forms so they're a lot more useful now the first mixture that I want to talk about is amonium nitrate nitromethane this is the the most simple and most readily available in the United States this is an explosive you can buy and have shipped entirely to your home so each component is not considered an explosive
3:49 until you put them together the ratio of ammonium nitrate to nitromethane is going to be 66 to 34 it's very common to apparently overfuel it at 60/40 that's uh kind of a common ratio that people use I prefer in you know in all my testing I'm doing the 66 34 and the purpose of that is that we're actually stretching uh the explosive yield as far as possible with ammonium nitrate the difference in cost between ammonium nitrate nitromethane is pretty substantial so although A&M is extremely simple it's the most simple of all these to prepare it is also the most expensive nitromethane if you can find it is typically going to be somewhere between $880 to $100 a gallon now the good thing about that is that with A&M you can really stretch the nitromethane pretty
4:35 far you're only going to be using you know for like a hand grenade type mass 150 g charge total you're only going to be using something like you know I mean depends on the composition but 25 uh grams of nitromethane so if you can imagine have a gallon you know you can make quite a few charges Mo most of the charge is going to be composed of ammonium nitrate Z you can uh use ammonium nitrate in the P form you can use agricultural grade Common ammonium nitrate you don't have to mechanically break it down I do because it gives a more intimate mixture I break it down um I will use a blender I'm not going to tell you that you should use a blender uh you know because there are a lot of circumstances where that would not be a good idea uh I use an oxidizer blender
5:22 that's only for ammonium nitrate I never put anything else in it that's what I'm that's what I'm using when I'm uh blending up ammonium nitrate and I do it in small portions at a time so that's how I get a you know fine ammonium nitrate to then mix with the nitromethane now you got to decide how you're going to do it I opt for a Ziploc bag I had another video where we did the ammonium nitrate nitromethane familiarization just going over some of the um just kind of testing the boundaries of nitromethane and auxiliary fuels somebody in the comments was concerned about static electricity setting off &m I'm never going to tell you you know never I'm not going to say never but uh you know this is not it's not going to detonate so all these components are already in they're already in plastic um but I make them in a plastic bag two components are intimately mixed you're now ready to
6:07 detonate this this is sensitized uh to a number eight cap A&M is the most powerful of the explosives that we're looking at today nitromethane detonation velocity is going to be somewhere over 6,000 m/s so this is a step up from traditional ammonium nitrate based explosives because of that nitromethane molecule so I prefer for sure to use auxiliary fuels with an& so I use aluminum aluminum uh you know this would be M uh the ratios you can use pretty wide ranging uh ratios some people have argued that uh you know 50% or so is about the maximum auxiliary load that used to use before you start uh turning some of this energy into you know light radiation sound um but there's also a
6:54 lot of heat produced so I think there is uh validity to using up to a 1 one ratio of aluminum to your A&M the other benefit of this is that you stretch your uh explosive charges twice as far you know so aluminum is very cheap nitromethane is very expensive you stretch it even farther if you're doing a one one ratio because now you're taking whatever your explosive charges you're going to double it and so you can you know split up the charges you can have bigger charges uh I really like to use the one1 ratio it throws off a ton of additional heat energy uh you know of course it's bright it's going to put off a lot of light it really extends the envelope of the pressure phases uh so that you get them elongated and it just has a lot more effect I mean it's it's kind of an incredible difference between um you know just
7:41 Stalone A&M and A&M with aluminum in one note uh with A&M on your caps etn I had some failures at around the 1 G load with etn pet and I have no failures RDX I have no failures at one gram it's plenty to set it off uh etn maybe 40% failures so it's right on the cusp of uh that detonation uh velocity and pressure being able to set it off if you're going to use etn I would probably recommend making an external booster charge just to make sure that you get a good detonation transfer so the next one we're talking about is going to be a metal complex explosive it's Unique in being a secondary explosive it's known as tan so tachan is uh it uses it stands for tetramine copper nitrate the copper
8:29 is it's going to be the center n nucleating uh atom in this complex and it's going to hold together uh let's see you get two two molecules of nitrate and you're going to get four amines uh so that's your ratio of uh constituents that make this complex any source of any of those groups or Metals will serve to make tachen so tachen can be made by uh heating ammonium nitrate with copper exposed to the ammonium nitrate it can be produce that way any source of copper any source of ammonium cat can be combined to produce T So saying that it's it is you know it's an ammonium nitrate explosive you can use ammonium nitrate to produce it you don't have to you can use other nitrate sources you can use you know nitric acid I did two
9:16 different methods the first one was extremely low yielding at this point in the video you're probably wondering why the video is paused and the reason why is because in the first upload a now unnamed chemist came into the comment section and proclaimed that he was so offended because number one he said I slandered his method and number two he was upset that I mentioned his name so what I'm going to do now is pause the video and I'm going to remove his name I'm going to bleep it out I'm not going to mention it again I'll never make that mistake again don't worry about it as to misattributing your method I wasn't using your method the only reason I mentioned your name was to be respectful because you had a method that used a jar that's the only two things that are in common we've got a Tetra aiming solution and we've got a jar going on here there is no other relation at all to your methods okay so this is not slander I
10:02 was just trying to be respectful to throw a shout out to you but that wasn't good enough and uh we had to be dramatic about it so now you know I'm I'm taking you out I'm going to take your name out of the video so that wasn't slander uh you just thought it was slander I'll tell you what is slander CHP is trash how about that which was um I mean basically I keep a jar sitting around with ammonia in it the ammonia is only I only use 10% and this is based off of uh Dr drama queen um his Tac in and tacp you know jar thing I do that um but just a mason jar I don't even put a hole in the lid I just put I just have a mason jar sitting around like a pickling jar and I just put uh scrap copper wire in it fill it up with ammonia solution ammonia Hydrox ammonium hydroxide I get the rudo 10% and uh this serves fine but you know
10:49 a higher concentration ammonia will be better 25 30% somewhere in there but you can get away with 10% I've done it a lot so normally what happens is that the copper will sit on the shelf I usually leave it there all the time I use some of it I'll top it back off with more ammonia it continues to dissolve the copper until there's no copper wire left if I want to use some of this uh copper Tetra amine then I just you know I pull out the wire and then pour off some of the solution so for making tack in out of this the way that I would normally do it would be to make the copper Tetra amine and then I would add ammonium nitrate so I'm just going to drop ammonium nitrate uh stir to dissolve when you put in ammonium nitrate it's going to get really cold uh you want to let go back to room temperature all the ammonium nitrate should dissolve and then you let it sit and you'll see a
11:35 separation of dark violet blue crystals going to the bottom of the jar and that's your tack in for whatever reason this sample of copper Tetra aing was really old uh and it had a lot of contaminants in it it had um you know was from it was from residential wiring copper wiring that got burned off in a fire there were definitely some organic contaminants on there and that might have affected some of the yield it didn't drop out very much tack in at all so because that didn't work very well what I did was I got a different sorts of copper I got my 10% ammonia solution I used a basic copper nitrate that I found sitting around and to make the charge for this video I took an arbitrary amount of basic copper nitrate dropped it into a jar with 10% ammonia solution and then I added some additional ammonium nitrate just to give it the the extra uh amine groups this
12:23 yielded an arbitrary amount of tack in that I'm using for the charge in this video so Tac in it's you know lustrous uh purple crystals they're really pretty they have a beautiful color the sensitivity on tack in in terms of impact energy you have 11.4 jewles that's right in the middle of second common secondary explosives uh and then your friction is 214 Newton which is um I mean that's average too you know for insensitive secondary explosive so it's pretty insensitive it has easy use as a secondary explosive detonation velocities at different pressures so at the bottom 83 G per cubic cm density 2700 m/s if we go up to 87 G per cubic cm we jump up to 3500 m/s 1.5 43
13:10 20 and then at about maximum density we have 1.6 G per cubic centimeter at that density we get 5,630 m/s there are some gning constants on here uh gning constant is the ability of an explosive to throw fragmentation essentially push it's really pushing metal but it does have a correlation to uh frag ability so at the low end at 75 G per cubic cimet which is very low density tack end you're going to get a gurnie velocity constant of 1630 so 1,630 m/ second that's pretty good that is technically it's technically on par with TNTs uh gurnie constant velocity although I really have trouble seeing how tack in could I think TNT is probably faster than tack in at pushing
13:56 frag but in terms of the calculated uh gurnie constants here um you know that's that's really decent 1.6 km a second is really decent at the high end you go up to uh 1.8 kilm a second which is pretty good uh the pressure is modest 12.5 I mean that's not very not very much but uh you know we are dealing with an ammonium nitrate explosive here so 12.5 GPA I'm talking gigap pasal uh critical diameter is listed from uh some of these paper sources uh as 4 m so 4 mm diameter below that uh you can achieve detonation I tested this out with the cap the cap was um approximately 5 1/2 mm uh internal diameter and I could not get
14:42 complete detonation so these caps you know in this in this small Mass uh you know that we were not achieving a steady state detonation there was a little bit that detonates and then fires off the remainder of the explosive but we're not getting transmission of full detonation through the whole explosive so here's a 60 G charge of tack in uh it's Loosely placed in a bag primed with a single cap going to electrically fire this and this is what you should expect and that's it it's a very simple explosive it's uh it's pretty cool uh nonhygroscopic you do want to keep it away from water so you don't want to expose tack into water because it'll destroy the complex but if you keep it dry I mean this is a very good simple cap sensitive way to use nitrate very
15:29 popular in amateur entics there's lots of videos about teken because it makes sense because it's such a ubiquitous explosive we have to mention it there are also other uh you know metal amine complexes that will work in this exact same capacity where you can you know like you could use any metal that's going to complex with ammonia and achieve the same effect okay the next one we're going to talk about is going to be a co- Crystal explosive this one is going to be known as AMT that stands for uh Amat tropin so that would be a contraction of ammonium nitrate and your tropin so AMT the source of this is going to be from a patent uh it's a pretty good explosive they they state that their measured velocities on detonation are going to be 4 to 5 KMS which is probably pretty accurate what's
16:16 really interesting about this one is that you're going to get uh melting point depression from ammonium nitrates so you this is a milk cast explosive so I tested that in this video we'll show that in my opinion this is this occupies this place of being the second simplest preparation of an ammonium nitrate explosive it has pretty high performance it has the unique ability to be uh melt cast its melting temperature is going to be 145 C which is very usable for anything that's higher temperature you wouldn't want to use this with uh etn okay but you know pettin uh I used it with uh nitr guanidine if you do that you're going to want to use a booster so the way that AMT is produced is somewhere between uh is somewhere around 90% ammonium nitrate and 10% hexamethylene
17:02 tetraamine uh hexamine the same that you use for you know production of RDX you add 10% of that now for my test I use 91 and N so 91% ammonium nitrate 9% hexamine that worked really well I can verify that the melting temp is somewhere around approximately 145 C it's that's pretty accurate it might be slightly lower than that and it melts really well I mean it's a thorough liquid it's a very mobile liquid um it's pretty easy to mix in other fuels into this uh melcast here so you know I melt down the AMT uh it's going to melt down you're going to smell some ammonia coming off it's going to be dropping a little bit of ammonia uh we're not getting decomposition uh nothing crazy and then you just pour it out on a cold service I'm using cold refrigerator glass it
17:47 works great and you just flake it off uh you can also cast it into an object if you want but I just flaked it off put it into a bag and then we primed it with a single cap one g pettin AMT was so simple and uh worked so well that I wanted to try to again with with just an introduction of uh you know metal fuel so we're just going to use aluminum and this is uh you know this is an over one:1 ratio so it's a it's a high ratio of aluminum uh I'm testing the limitations of you know how how reactive this can be with aluminum so AMT was rendered down into the Melt State and then uh you know a one one ratio of aluminum was added mixed in until it was homogeneous and this was poured into a simple tin foiled
18:40 [Music] mold and I think on the Spectrum the performance of AMT compared to its Simplicity is probably it's difficult to beat uh it's pretty nice for an ammonium nitrate based explosive AMT is purportedly hygroscopic so uh you're going to want to keep it um contained from the air so that it's not drawing in moisture from atmospheric air okay last one I want to talk about here this is known ASC so AMC is a co-crystallization between ammonium nitrate and glycine glycine is an amino acid I'm a huge amino acid explosive freak I love playing around with amino acids they're so crazy and versatile and
19:26 have such unexpected effects I just just love using them so I am partial to amgc in my opinion overall this is all together the overall best ammonium nitrate uh mcast explosive socu is developed from a patent uh this is the patent right here there are lots of different grades of amgc depending on the content of glycine they vary with melting point this is a a melt castable explosive the lowest melting temperature is going to be at 118 C which is great that's very low that would be at a gly content of about 15% it goes up from there steadily all the way up to glycine at 60% which is going to have a 141c melt temp now the preferred embodiment from the patent is going to use 94 parts
20:12 of ammonium nitrate and six parts of glycine you're going to add 15 parts of water you then heat this mixture with stirring up to 60c and maintain that temp for 30 minutes and then cool to 5c I've gotten really sloppy with this procedure and done all kinds of crazy stuff like forgot it in the freezer overnight left it just solidify into a solid block of ice it's pretty flexible in the way that you prepare it you then separate the product uh the co- Crystal product from you know the mother liquor I guess you would call it and you're going to do a drying operation I usually am drying this around 70 c something like that I'm drying it until it's totally dry it's going to be a uh you know it's going to dry as a powder and now this is a cap sensitive number eight cap sensitive ammonium nitrate based explosive that is a melt cast carrier so
21:00 you can put other explosives in this and the huge benefit of AMC although it's not even mentioned in the pattern if I recall correctly I have found through my testing that amgc is not hygroscopic so this does not draw in moisture from the air there is some kind of stabilization that occurs with this co- Crystal between Glycine and ammonium nitrate to make the ammonium nitrate nonhygroscopic it's a major advantage I thinkc is is probably all around the best ammonium general purpose explosive that I've tested at least so far in the patent uh he is you know detonating this this is the 600 milligram of peton Detonator which is pretty modest for a Detonator he's not getting any issues at a base charge uh you know that small I used a test charge that was just powdered A&C
21:46 it wasn't even melt casted yet um and I just put it into a plastic bag Center primed it one G pet and cap Works fantastic [Music] I did attempt to do a mil cast with AMC I mean I've done it before I've used angc for a long time so I attempted to do a nitr guanine uh mil cast with the material and that was for the purpose of the video uh it didn't it didn't get complete detonation so it gets partial detonation um I did a a melt of a 1 one ratio of nitri quantity togc that's about the maximum that it can contain uh at the other ratios so this is you know I'm talking at the 94 Parts ammonium nitrate to six part glycine is what I'm
22:32 using as a milk cast carrier I think some of the other uh you know your your amino acid component is what is really allowing the nitr guanine to to dissolve so some of the embodiments with a greater quantity of glycine they're they're likely going to be able to melt more um you know for instance nitr guanidine but I've done melts with amgc with other explosives Paton works great Paton one of the best ones if you want to get higher performance out of it aluminum obviously also works Nitro Guan in this case it uh the charge didn't work it's just too insensitive to get complete detonation and so it just kind of Peters out you don't get you don't get a complete detonation to fire Nitro quanity at high density you really have to use a booster charge so that's it I
23:18 mean that's you know you got four ammonium nitrate based explosives right there they're all really high performance they work great I mean considering it's based on ammonium nitrate um the AMC is proba the best filler uh in terms of uh you know filling devices or charges I think amgc is probably the most capable out of these but even something as simple as AMT or even tacken you know like in a uh in an emergency uh Supply situation tacken has been recommended by explosive technicians to be used as a replacement for TNT and I think based off these gurnie constants I think that's possible I think it can fill the role of a you know like a hand grenade filler and work just fine so learn more about these explosives um try them out check them out these are definitely going to be
24:03 around in uh the apocalypse situation because ammonium nitrate is definitely the most common explosive that you find around the world worldwide it is everywhere so these are some really awesome ammonium nitrate based compositions they're flexible they're versatile they have a lot of utility all right I hope you enjoyed this video take care [Music]
