Emulsion Explosives Minimum Self-sustaining Combustion Pressure (minimum Burning Pressure) Testing Study

With its outstanding performance emulsion explosives were widely used in the world. However, the pumping accidents of emulsion explosives were still not explained satisfactorily, because of the lack of safety awareness.As it says going that, due to decomposition of ammonium nitrate at the start when there is a big endothermic dissociation reactions, reaction at the beginning stage of absorbing a lot of heat to maintain the reaction, but once the heat is less than the heat absorption reaction will stop. The emulsion explosives have similar nature. When a certain external pressure existing, the combustion performance will be improved significantly, which resulting in the increase of heat release, and the combustion of emulsion explosives can propagate. So you can guess that emulsion explosives have a minimum self-sustaining combustion pressure, this could be the MBP (Minimum Burning Pressure). Below this pressure, the emulsion explosives won't burn self-sustaining. Thus the pumping pressure may be the key factor which causing the accidents.No standard method can be used to test the MBP values of emulsion explosive in the world nowadays. This paper studied the testing method of MBP of emulsion explosives. The testing method which including a relatively simple operation, good reproducibility and higher reliability testing was determined through analyzing different testing conditions.The factors of the formulation of emulsion explosive which might impact on the MBP values were tested. It is found that water content, salts, emulsifiers and emulsion explosives sensitized or no had a significant effect on the MBP values, while the impact of wax was small.We tested the MBP values of different size of the ammonium nitrate, and analyzed the impact of different size on MBP values.