Chemoinformatics for the Safety of Energetic and Reactive Materials at Ineris

The characterization of physical hazards of substances is a key information to manage the risks associated to their use, storage and transport. With decades of work in this area, Ineris develops and implements cutting-edge experimental facilities allowing such characterizations at different scales and under various conditions to study all of the dreaded accident scenarios. This review presents the efforts engaged by Ineris more recently in the field of chemoinformatics to develop and use new predictive methods for the anticipation and management of industrials risks associated to energetic and reactive materials as a complement to experiments. An overview of the methods used for the development of Quantitative Structure-Property Relationships for physical hazards are presented and discussed regarding the specificities associated to this class of properties. A review of models developed at Ineris is also provided from the first tentative models on the explosivity of nitro compounds to the successful application to the flammability of organic mixtures. Then, a discussion is proposed on the use of QSPR models. Good practices for robust use for QSPR models are recalled with specific comments related to physical hazards, notably for regulatory purpose. Dissemination and training efforts engaged by Ineris are also presented. The potential offered by these predictive methods in terms of in silico design and for the development of new intrinsically safer technologies in safety-by-design strategies is finally discussed. At last, challenges and perspectives to extend the application of chemoinformatics in the field of safety and in particular for the physical hazards of energetic and reactive substances are proposed.

Contemplation on spark sensitivity of certain nitramine type explosives

Spark sensitivity of explosives is an important subject. Presently, some correlations are sought between the spark sensitivity and certain molecular orbital characteristics of some nitramine type explosives. For that purpose certain semi-empirical and DFT calculations have been carried out. Investigations have revealed that the nitramines considered undergo decomposition in the electric field mainly via their anionic states.

Theoretical prediction of electric spark sensitivity of nitroaromatic energetic compounds based on molecular structure

A new simple correlation is introduced for predicting electric spark sensitivity of nitroaromatic compounds. This approach is based on the number of carbons and hydrogens as well as the ratio of hydrogens to oxygens and the presence of certain groups, i.e. alkyl or alkoxy groups, attached to an aromatic ring. The model is optimized using a set of 17 polynitroaromatic explosives as training set and then it is applied to 14 explosives from a variety of chemical families as test set in order to assess the predictive capability of new method. Predicted results are reasonably close to the measured values for both training and test sets.