Abstract

High explosive materials, and in particular insensitive high explosive (IHE) materials, are of significant interest. TATB-based LX-17 and PBX 9502 are two IHE’s and mechanical properties are an important metric of performance. In this work we present, for the first time, a study of fracture as a function of temperature and displacement rate and starter crack length on billet pressed IHE materials using a standard three point bend technique [1-15]. We demonstrated that the technique can yield consistent results over time by measuring samples from the same lots 4 years later and observed that the fracture toughness of LX-17 and PBX 9502 are similar. We also determined the temperature dependence for different starter crack lengths and found that the fracture toughness generally decreases with larger starter crack sizes and temperatures. For the LX-17, where a wide temperature range of −60 C to 50 C was investigated, the impact of temperature on fracture toughness between −20 C and 23 C was less than expected.