One way to increase safety in an explosive is to develop alternatives to traditional thermal initiation. This includes photoinitiation or other electroactive pathways that involve control of chemical reactions in a material. Development in this field has been hindered by the lack of suitable molecules that are electroactive and retain desired explosive performance properties. The high nitrogen content, high heat of formation and low lying π system of tetrazines make them ideal candidates for the synthesis of energetic materials that are photochemically and electrochemically active. These properties can be tuned either by derivatizing the tetrazines and/or coordinating them to metal centers. We will describe the synthesis and properties of several members of this new class of materials.

New class of energetic chromophores for optical initiation of explosives: Transition metal complexes of explosive tetrazines

251st National Meeting (2016)

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