Utilizing JMP’s Nonlinear Design Platform to Design Chemical Reaction Kinetics Experiments

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Kevin Singer, US Army ARDEC

Energetic materials play a particularly large role in the effectiveness of the United States Military. They can be found everywhere from projectile propellants to the warheads of munitions. The confidence that our warfighters can utilize these energetic systems reliably across the stockpile is paramount to mission success. The difficulty is that these materials are often stored for long periods of time and/or in less than ideal environments. It is therefore important for the military services to understand how these materials will degrade over time and across environments. The process of chemical degradation follows an Arrhenius form where one of the parameters of interest is the reaction order, an exponent. Additionally, the variance is typically not constant throughout the process, changing both with temperature and reactant concentration.

The nonlinear fit platform accurately predicts root parameters when input properly, is very useful for modelling chemical kinetics and estimating the useful life of degrading components, and is capable of augmenting chemical kinetics experiments based on the generalized rate law equations to effectively determine reaction order. This poster describes how we used the JMP nonlinear platform to confirm the reaction order for our experiment.