Herein, the thermal characteristics of flash powders of different combinations of Potassium Nitrate, Sulphur, Aluminium and Boron are reported. From the literature, it is identified that Boron implements lack of sensitiveness to flash powder mixture, which promotes the safety during the manufacturing process. But the thermal behaviour of the Boron blended compositions remain a mystery. Hence, various combinations of flash powder compositions are prepared by keeping the % of KNO3 and % of S as constant, and gradually 23% of Aluminium is reduced (23% to 0) by increasing the quantity of Boron (0 to 23%) in 19 trials, and are subjected to TGA/DSC analysis individually. The TGA and the DSC analysis reveals that the 65.65% replacement of Aluminium with Boron mixture shows predominant characteristics which is suitable for fireworks. Also, the reaction kinetics and the critical ignition temperature are calculated for the optimum composition. The performance of the fireworks product is checked with varying quantity to meet out the optimum quality.
In fireworks industries, water-added mixtures like tip mixtures, and aerial star pellet coatings are susceptible to self-decomposition because aluminium readily reacts with water that is used with them. While adding water to the tip mixture, the aluminium undergoes hydration and forms an oxide. It also liberates heat and hydrogen gas, which leads to an explosion. Similarly, the star pellets coated with aluminium also had the same problem. To avoid the hazard due to self-decomposition, partial replacement of aluminium powder helps in the reduction of workplace accidents/injuries. Recently, researchers used boron as a substituent for aluminium in dry mixtures such as flash powder composition. In this work, the use of aluminium in the wet mixtures is gradually replaced with boron. The thermal analysis and the decomposition tests were conducted for the boron-blended wet mixtures. The performance characteristics of boron-blended tip mixtures and star pellets were evaluated to determine the optimum level of replacement to sustain the quality with improved safety.
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