A nesting ubiquitiform (NU) approach was developed to characterize the mesostructural features of polymer-bonded explosives (PBXs), and then used to predicate some equivalent physical properties of PBXs, which can also be expected to be extended to other composites with complicated internal mesostructures. To verify the availability, two NU models for two kinds of PBX with different compositions are presented, which are PBX 9501 and LX-17, based on which, the equivalent thermal conductivities were calculated. Particularly, it is so encouraging that an analytical expression of the equivalent thermal conductivity was obtained only under a simply assumption of homogeneity. Moreover, it was found that the numerical results calculated by both the recursive algorithm and the analytical expression were in good agreement with the experimental data. In addition, it is also shown that such a physical property as the equivalent thermal conductivity is indeed independent of the meso-configuration of the location distribution of the explosive particles and the voids inside the PBX, which seems consistent with the common expectations and lays the foundations for the application of ubiquitiform to investigating some equivalent properties of composites.
Keywords: PBX; complexity; nesting ubiquitiform model; particle size distribution; thermal conductivity.