BINARY AND TERNARY EUTECTICS INVOLVING AMMONIUM NITRATE

Abstract

With the object of preparing an 80:20 amatol that could be poured, instead of hand-stemmed, the eutectics of many binary and ternary systems, of which ammonium nitrate was one component, have been investigated. It was previously known that ammonium nitrate and sodium nitrate had a eutectic at 120.8 °C., a temperature still too high for shell filling, but this binary mixture was frequently used as a basis for the construction of ternary mixtures. The nature of the third component was dictated by practical considerations and varied widely, e.g., alkali nitrate, nitrate of heavy metal, nitrate of organic base, and various organic substances. None of these ternary mixtures was actually used as a shell filling (with trinitrotoluene), though the ammonium nitrate–ethylenediamine dinitrate eutectic, containing 50% ethylenediamine dinitrate and melting at 100 °C., comes near to satisfying all requirements; this mixture is entirely non-hygroscopic. Incidental to the work, some interesting phenomena were observed, e.g., the discovery that octadecylamine nitrate forms liquid crystals.