Novel fullerene-based stabilizer for scavenging nitroxide radicals and its behavior during thermal decomposition of nitrocellulose.

The safe storage of double-based propellants is becoming increasingly challenging due to the extreme storage environment and update of weapon system. Therefore, to obtain high performance stabilizers, a novel multifunctional fullerene derivative, 4,11,15,30-tetramethophenyl fullereno[1,2:2',3']dihydrobenzofuran (C-DBTMP), was successfully designed and synthesized. The results of thermal stability indicated that the stability of C-DBTMP is better than that of traditional stabilizers (DPA, C2, AKII), and still maintain good performance at high temperature. Further thermal analysis showed that C-DBTMP interact with the decomposition products during the thermal decomposition of nitrocellulose, which changed the decomposition mechanism of nitrocellulose at the initial stage of thermal decomposition from self-accelerating catalytic model to non-autocatalytic reaction model. The stabilization mechanism was also investigated in detail, electron spin resonance (ESR) test showed that the nitroxide radicals scavenging efficiency of C-DBTMP is 73.4%, and effectively inhibit the acidity change caused by the thermal decomposition of nitrocellulose. Our study demonstrated the potential application of this multifunctional fullerene derivative as a stabilizer for propellants and provided a new strategy for designing high-performance stabilizers.