Kinetics and Combustion Behavior of Atomized Zn-Mg Alloy Powder

Ming-Xing Zhang; Chen-Guang Zhu; Xiao Xie; Si-Yu Liu

doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c02496

Kinetics and Combustion Behavior of Atomized Zn-Mg Alloy Powder

ACS Omega. 2023 Jun 26;8(27):24503-24512. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.3c02496. eCollection 2023 Jul 11.

Authors

Ming-Xing Zhang¹, Chen-Guang Zhu¹, Xiao Xie², Si-Yu Liu³

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, P. R. China.
² Science and Technology on Combustion and Explosion Laboratory, Xi'an Modern Chemistry Research Institute, 168 Zhangba East Road, Xi'an 710065, P. R. China.
³ Hunan Vanguard Group Co., Ltd., Changsha, Hunan 410100, P. R. China.

Abstract

Using pyrolants instead of warhead charges can release red light and thick smoke for target practice to highlight the safety of the impact point and dud disposal. In order to find the ideal material, the combustion and kinetic properties of two Zn-Mg alloys at critical proportions were investigated. Thermogravimetry/differential scanning calorimetry (TG/DSC) experiments in pure oxygen were conducted with atomized Zn-Mg alloy powder in the ratio of 7:3 and the ratio of 8:2 with three particle diameters under different heating rates. The kinetic parameters of the six materials were obtained by ASTM E698 and Ozawa-Flynn-Wall (OFW) methods, indicating that the activation energy (E_α) of the 7:3 Zn-Mg alloy powder was lower than that of the 8:2 Zn-Mg alloy powder when the particle size distributions are similar. By the method of nonlinear multivariate regression, the oxidation reaction of Zn-Mg alloy powder was divided into two steps. The proportion of mass gain of the first-step reaction of 7:3 Zn-Mg alloy powder was 0.462-0.518, and the proportion of mass gain of the first-step reaction of 8:2 Zn-Mg alloy powder was 0.138-0.228. Reaction mechanism functions of the two-step reaction of Zn-Mg alloy oxidation were derived as f(α) = (1 - α)ⁿ(1 + k_cat·α). The results of combustion experiments showed that the pyrolants composed of 7:3 alloy can burn stably to produce satisfactory smoke and light signals, while the pyrolants composed of 8:2 alloy cannot achieve this. The 7:3 Zn-Mg alloy powder is an ideal ingredient for pyrotechnic compositions.