mfilip62 - 21-8-2007 at 12:58
Hy folks,
Any of you tried this relatively new usable explosive!
I know that most of you are familyar with this one,
butt for those who arent...
Depsite all the others new,exotic,wierd,dangerous explosive this one requires only simple nitration via sulfuric acid/nitrate
and erytheitol-sugar alchohol as the base!
Erythritol Tetranitrate has positive OB(please leave this for further conversations),
similar VOD as TNT,
great RE of 1.60,
it is a bitt more sensitive than PETN(perfect
),
AND THE MOST IMPORTANT
it melts at 61°C!!!
(I think it isn´t toxic much,if at all)
It cann be related vit the sorbitol and manitol nitrates
butt it is way more stabile!
You cann find erythritol in the healty food stores!
My question is;
Have any of you tried to make this one,tested it,and the most important,cast it!
I am very low on chemicaly and equipment for now
becouse i have had some problems!
If any of you cann post a repor on ETN,I will appreciate that wery wery much!
Thanks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythritol_tetranitrate
[Edited on 21-8-2007 by mfilip62]
Sauron - 21-8-2007 at 13:22
This is 19th century news.
Nothing more sensitive than PETN is likely to replace TNT in the future. Both the military and the industrial explosives markets want less
sensitivity, not more.
hinz - 22-8-2007 at 09:28
I've once melted (mp113°C) and on further heating decomposed about 0.1g of mannitol hexanitrate on a tea spoon with a bunsen burner. I wanted to know
whether it explodes or decomposes by flame. The 0.1g melted, then on higher temperature started to fume and finally burnt without exploding.
I don't know if more MHN behaves the same way when heated, probably it will make a DDT when more MHN is heated beyoint melting point and auto-ignites.
Since ETN auto-ignites at 160°C, a water bath should work perfectly, but to be sure how the stuff behave, you could try to heat a small ammount
(1-5g) in an oil bath till it decomposes or explodes, (go away after switching on the hotplate 
)
Maybe it's not the casting which causes the problems but the ETN that spills or remains in the melting pot, when it freezes back, it crystallises and
if you break away the spills or the ETN that hangs at the walls of the det cap tube or in the casting pot, it detonates because of piezoelectric
efffects or the energy released when breaking a crystall. TNT isn't set off by a small spark, but sugar nitrates probably are.
vulture - 22-8-2007 at 13:03
1-5g a small amount? Sounds like a nice amount to blow your heating setup to bits and perforate your eardrums...
The_Davster - 22-8-2007 at 15:41
1-5g is not a small ammount of explosive...
Small is in the 10s of milligrams, and the detonation of these ammounts are enough to make your ears ring. Larger can cause hearing damage.
Back at the main topic, ETN will never replace TNT. The sensitivity is too high for use in munitions, and the cost of erythritol is much much greater
than that of toluene. Not talking about the cost of erythritol at your health food store vs toluene at the hardware store, industrially the cost of
the two would be magnitudes apart.
Lambda - 22-8-2007 at 23:42
@hinz, here you have your few Grams of Detonating Erythritol Tetranitrate. A Blast like this in ones Face will mess up "Hobby Chemistry"
Permanently, and give any Surgeon a Field Task of Repairs, if at all !
Rogue Explosion Movies Page 2:
http://geocities.com/roguemovies2/index.html
Erythritol Tetranitrate:
http://geocities.com/roguemovies2/etn.zip
An explosive much more expensive, much more sensitive, less stable (less than 10 years storage or more), and similar VOD as TNT is a Trash Bin
Candidate.
Organic Nitrates for Angina problems:
http://journals.prous.com/journals/servlet/xmlxsl/pk_journal...
Before we realize it, all potential "wanabe" Terrorists are having Angina problems, and desperately need Erythritol Tetranitrate subscribed by there
Physicians.
Regards,
Lambda.
hinz - 23-8-2007 at 07:34
I know how a few grams of nitrated polyalkohols detonate, but it's not possible to see how they behave at higher temperatures by heating a few
milligrams, because a few mg of some kind of nitrated sugar will hardly do DDT, it will decompose slowly without detonation. A few mg of eg. TNT will
also decompose at high temperature without detonation.
But it's not possible to say that if a few mg decompose without detonation on heating that 5g will also decompose slowly. The heat of decomposition at
eg. 5g might trigger the detonation.
And if he wants to cast some of this stuff ( when casting you are very close to it) it would be good to see how a simmilar amount of
ETN behaves when it's overheated.
If you try it out, you are able to see whether it detonates sponaneously or fumes before detonation and how high the temperature is when it detonates
And I've also written thet he should go away after switching on the hotplate, he won't be hurt in any way when he's watching the detionation from 10m
away.
And when an old thin filled with vegetable oil is used to heat a few grams of it in a old test tube on a normal hot plate (without any magnetic
stirrer), the equipment costs are also low as the hotplate will presumably survive.
Rosco Bodine - 23-8-2007 at 08:41
A few grams of ETN going high order will *easily* destroy
any ordinary hotplate .
And at 10 meters , other than losing ones eyesight ,
or possibly ones life from a fragment ....yeah the danger of being incinerated from the radiation or killed by overpressure
is non-existent ....small consolation to the blind or dead .
Maybe people should refrain from expounding authoritatively
on things they obviously know not one damn thing about ,
particularly with regards to energetic materials . Because it so often leads to the blind leading the blind or dead .
[Edited on 23-8-2007 by Rosco Bodine]
quicksilver - 24-8-2007 at 05:17
Nitro benzenes are extremely simple to mfg under industrial conditions and very inexpensive. Nitric esters require more demanding conditions and are
more expensive in this particular instance (ETN) as the base materials is still very expensive on an industrial scale. An easy oversimplified way to
conceptualize this is thing of one as using temps higher than room temp and presenting less run-a-way influences while the other demands cold;
continually. That alone should answer the query. But doing any background research would reveal many more reasons. The standard for decades has been
TNT and comparative esters do not offer what TNT does.
Boomer - 24-8-2007 at 07:27
Rosco is right, and even if you *are* behind cover to avoid fragments, and it quietly burns ten times out of ten tests, it means shit.
Some people had several grams of TATP only flash off if ignited in the open. I once had a pea-sized lump of perhaps a tenth gram detonate on the tip
of a knife when trying to show someone the fireball effect. Ringing ears for both of us.
What I mean is, no matter how often it does *not* make DDT, it only tells you that it doesn't do so every time. It only has to make DDT *once* to make
you an unhappy person for the rest of your life.
And even if ETN is heated in a water bath at just above 61 deg C, some traces of decomposition products can form, making the cast charge un-storable
due to the autocatalytic nature of the process.
One last thing (and here you were right) is that bigger amounts can behave differently. The oh-so-Stable PETN (most stable of the esters) can survice
100C without decomposition in small amounts and for a short time. But a big mass *will* self-heat to detonation if stored at 70C! I will look up the
figures, but this phenomenon is called Tc (critical temperature), and it is vastly different even for the same substance in different amounts and
geometries.
[Edited on by Boomer]
mfilip62 - 26-8-2007 at 15:28
As I understanded DDT is formated by decomposion of ETN and this is wery unstable explosive!
What exacly is DDT!?
It isn´t infamous insecticide 4,4'-(2,2,2-trichloroethane-
1,1-diyl)bis(chlorobenzene) or shortly C14H9Cl5 , right!?
Why are you all so histerical and critical about sensitivity of ETN!?
It cann not be more sensitive than NG or tricky like TATP!
It isnt ewen a primary explosive thought!
Ozone - 26-8-2007 at 16:50
Sweet Jesus!
If you do not know what DDT is, in the context of energetic materials...PLEASE, do not attempt to manufacture or detonate any explosive!
The loss may not be your own, and that is worse.
'ware,
O3
ZoSo357 - 28-8-2007 at 03:39
please excuse me for posting this synthesis as a new topic originally, I figured the discussion of ETN replacing TNT would be considered a different
topic than the synthesis of ETN. Anyhow..
Did a new tetranitrol synthesis today since it's been so long.
Never knew I had a camera in the house until I had crashed with water. So the pictures are only of the precipitate and after.
Synth was as follows:
48 grams of NH4NO3
15 grams erythritol
100 ml's 98% sulfuric acid
Added all the ammonium nitrate in about 3 scoops, while stirring vigerously. Stirring was kept throughout most of the reaction (including nitration
time)
erythritol was added in about 5 or 6 scoops, while stirring rapidly.
Once all the erythritol was added, I continued to stir pretty well constantly other than short breaks here and there, for about 35 minutes. At no
point did the reaction vessel heat to more than room temperature.
The whole solution was poured as a thin stream into about 1.5 liters of water which was chilled in the freezer with some ice cubes in it which had a
layer of ice forming on the top, while stirring.
Solution was decanted through coffee filters and neutralized with sodium bicarb. soln.
Yield is currently drying, so final product weight will be posted in the morning.
precipitate:
bicarb solution
neutralization
yield
closeup
Eclectic - 28-8-2007 at 07:28
Please enlighten as to the meaning of DDT in the context of ETN. All I could find immediately with Google was "deflagration to detonation". I'm
certainly not a chemistry NOOB, but not being obsessed with explosives, don't know what it means myself...
hinz - 28-8-2007 at 08:14
It means Deflagration to Detonation Transition, here's an interesting article about this and the rest of the topic:
http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/309218.pdf
Sauron - 28-8-2007 at 08:52
I have to agree with O3. You had better study some p-chem and basics of explosives technology before you muck around with making nitrosugars.
What you don't know can maim or kill you.
Eclectic - 28-8-2007 at 11:17
Thanks Hinz. That's a lot more useful than "you are an ignorant fool if you don't know the jargon"
Rosco Bodine - 28-8-2007 at 14:44
DDT reminds me of that old Black Flag insecticide commercial .....where the staggering bug cartoon character just before collapsing completely , gasps
and crys out his last words .....
" This stuff just kills me ! "
And then the announcers voice says
" Get Black Flag , it kills bugs dead . "
Raid was another brand that came out with similar stuff ,
classic TV commercials , so corny they were hilarious .
[Edited on 28-8-2007 by Rosco Bodine]
mfilip62 - 28-8-2007 at 15:11
Thanks Electric!
O3 you act youreselve as an ignorant antediluvian fool!!!
Try not to ofend youreselve,but how cann i know what
is DDT as the slang for Deflagration to Detonation Transition!!!
I know what this is,but newer hearded for that acronym (slang)!!!
Have you ewer hearded for PROM(antipersonal bouncing fragmentation mine),soap(slang or pressed TNT),zolja(some sort of LAW) and so on!
I maded and detonated more explosivee than you have saw it trought youre entirel life!
And yes ZoSo357 your sintetisize is welcome,
thank you wery much and please brief us about
detonation and maybe even casting if you feel safe to do that depsite paranoic comments about pizoelectronic efect and other mumbo-jumbos!
Ozone - 28-8-2007 at 16:12
Thanks for putting up the great .pdf, Hinz.
Antediluvian? Perhaps...
...Enough to know about the search feature on this website. Had you simply input DDT, you would have immediately satisfied your curiosity.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
~Abraham Lincoln
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)
Best of luck,
O3
Boomer - 31-8-2007 at 08:29
We are not hysteric, just finding it risky to heat/melt/cast one of the most sensitive and least thermally stable secondary explosives known.
We do know that most likely it will not burn or detonate, it might just start to stink after casting, showing it decomposes. Still no professional
researcher would handle it then, and for a reason.
The chance for an accident may be only 0.01%, you may be 99.99% save. But with ten thousand home chemists working with energetic materials, this means
a 50:50 chance one *will* have an accident. This is not only bad for the home chemists (more restrictive laws...), but it *could* be you.
Seen the cartoon, with God hitting one of two humans with lightning, who screams "Why me", God: "Why not, why him?"
Always remember, less than a gram of a nitrate ester can easily remove some fingers, take it from me! And no, there is no re-attaching, only red
drops are left, I did search... 
[Edited on by Boomer]