The end product was calcium cyanamide, and the Frank-Caro process is often known as the cyanamide process.Ī second process, the Haber-Bosch process, was invented later, and was more economical. Their process used calcium carbide to react with nitrogen gas at a temperature of 1,000° Celsius. The first process to do that was invented by the German chemists Adolph Frank and Nikodem Caro in 1895. There is no carbon, so there is no black sooty smoke.Īmmonium nitrate was not used as an explosive before the invention of a way of combining hydrogen with the nitrogen in the air to form ammonia gas. When detonated, the reaction products are all gases, such as water vapor, nitrogen gas, and oxides of nitrogen. This is because the ammonium ion provides fuel, in the form of those four white hydrogen atoms you can see in the image.
Take away the water, and the ions arrange themselves in a regular order (thus falling into a lower energy state) and crystallize.Īmmonium nitrate is explosive, unlike metal nitrates such as potassium nitrate (saltpeter). In a water solution, the water molecules (which have a positive end and a negative end) surround the ions and mask their charges from one another, and they lose their mutual attraction, and dissolve. In a salt, the ion from the acid is negatively charged, and the ion from the base is positively charged. A salt is what you get when you combine an acid (in this case nitric acid) with a base (ammonia). The simplest is ammonium nitrate.Īmmonium nitrate is a salt.
The nitrate-based explosives contain the nitrate group, NO 3. We will be primarily discussing high explosives, since almost all explosives since black powder are of this type. In this chapter, we will discuss the classes of explosive, which depends on the types molecules used (their chemistry), and the mix of different molecules used. So far, we have discussed explosives by when they were invented, and later, to some extent, by their sensitivity to heat, friction, or shock.
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