Abstract
The paper presents the results of simulations of the influence of the reaction progress of the material at the moment of the beginning of the thermal experiment (called as ??storage) on the thermal behavior in mg- (as in DSC), kg- (SADT or cookoff), and ton- (TMRad) scales. Simulations were carried out using the general autocatalytic (first-order reaction with autocatalysis, Kamal-Sourour, KS), nucleation (Avrami-Erofeev, A4) and first-order (F1) reaction models. Results of simulation show that influence of ??storage is significant for materials decomposing according to autocatalytic models and negligible for those decomposing according to the first-order kinetics. For the determination of the importance of ??storage value on the course of reaction and, further, on the simulations of the thermal behavior of the materials, we propose the simple AKTS test which requires only two non-isothermal runs with identical, arbitrarily chosen heating rates. The goal of this test consists in controlled, artificial aging of the sample, reflecting the minor changes of reaction progress during sample storage. In other words, the test allows comparison of the thermal behavior of the same sample having, however, in two following experiments, slightly different ??storage values. Additionally we present the simulations of the dependence of thermal properties of the materials on the ??storage under real, climate conditions. All presented results indicate that the decomposition progress of the materials at the beginning of any thermal treatment must be considered as an important parameter, beside commonly applied kinetic triplet, during prediction of the sample properties.
