Crystal Morphology Controlling of TATB by High Temperature Anti‐Solvent Recrystallization

AbstractThe spheroidizing of TATB (1,3,5‐triamino‐2,4,6‐trinitrobenzene) can help to control preferred orientation and anisotropic expansion of TATB based PBXs, as well as to improve crystal quality, desensitizing efficiency, packing density, and even explosive energy. In this paper, TATB crystals with different morphology were obtained by high temperature recrystallization from anti‐solvents. TATB was dispersed into DMSO and heated to dissolve. Water as an anti‐solvent was added to the solution with different conrol parameters. We designed additional experiments to study the particular influence of these parameters. It was shown that the crystal morphology is strongly affected by the stirring rate and the amount of water added. The recrystallized TATB samples have similar thermal stability as starting TATB, but higher densities and purities, which indicates that the quality of TATB crystals was improved. By slowly adding an appropriate amount of water and cooling, regular crystals of TATB were obtained, which proves that water is a good morphology modifier for TATB.