NS3E «Nanomatériaux pour les Systèmes Sous Sollicitations Extrêmes» UMR ISL-CNRS-UDS 3208, French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis, 5 Rue du Général Cassagnou, 68301 Saint-Louis, France.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:2159. doi: 10.1038/srep02159.
The detonation process is able to build new materials with a bottom-up approach. Diamond, the hardest material on earth, can be synthesized in this way. This unconventional synthesis route is possible due to the presence of carbon inside the high-explosive molecules: firing high-explosive mixtures with a negative oxygen balance in a non-oxidative environment leads to the formation of nanodiamond particles. Trinitrotoluene (TNT) and hexogen (RDX) are the explosives primarily used to synthesize nanodiamonds. Here we show that the use of nanostructured explosive charges leads to the formation of smaller detonation nanodiamonds, and it also provides new understanding of nanodiamond formation-mechanisms. The discontinuity of the explosive at the nanoscale level plays the key role in modifying the diamond particle size, and therefore varying the size with microstructured charges is impossible.
爆炸过程能够采用自下而上的方法构建新材料。地球上最硬的材料金刚石就是通过这种方式合成的。由于高爆炸物分子内部存在碳，这种非常规的合成途径成为可能：在非氧化性环境中引爆具有负氧平衡的高爆炸物混合物会导致纳米金刚石颗粒的形成。三硝基甲苯（TNT）和奥克托今（RDX）是主要用于合成纳米金刚石的爆炸物。在这里，我们表明使用纳米结构的爆炸物装药会导致更小的爆炸纳米金刚石的形成，这也为纳米金刚石形成机制提供了新的认识。爆炸物在纳米尺度上的不连续性在改变金刚石颗粒尺寸方面起着关键作用，因此使用微结构装药来改变尺寸是不可能的。
