Nacre-inspired interface structure design of polymer bonded explosives toward significantly enhanced mechanical performance

Realizing effective enhancement to the structure of interface region between explosive crystals and polymer binder plays a key role in improving the mechanical properties of the current polymer bonded explosives (PBXs). Herein, inspired by the structure of natural nacre which possesses outstanding mechanical performance, a kind of nacre-like structural layer is constructed in the interface region of PBXs composites, making use of two-dimensional graphene sheets and one-dimensional bio-macromolecules of cellulose as inorganic and organic building blocks, respectively. Our results reveal that the constructed nacre-like structural layer can effectively improve the interfacial strength and then endow the PBXs composites with significantly enhanced mechanical properties involving of creep resistance, Brazilian strength and fracture toughness, demonstrating the obvious advantage of such bioinspired interface structure design strategy. In addition, the thermal conduction performance of PBXs composites also exhibits noticeable enhancement due to the remarkable phonon transport capability endowed by the asdesigned nacre-like structural layer. We believe this work provides a novel design route to conquer the issue of weak interfacial strength in PBXs composites and greatly increase the comprehensive properties for better meeting the higher requirements proposed to the explosive part of weapon equipment in new era.(c) 2023 China Ordnance Society. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study constructs a nacre-like structural layer in the interface region of polymer bonded explosives composites, inspired by the structure of natural nacre, and finds that this design significantly improves the mechanical and thermal properties of the composite material.