Group Interaction Modelling of PETN

Group Interaction Modelling (GIM) is a relatively simple model developed to predict the properties of polymers based upon the interaction of a potential function between two adjacent molecules, and a thermodynamic energy balance equation relating the various energy contributions to an ensemble of molecular units. GIM has seen limited application to predicting the properties of explosives, but has not previously been applied to PETN; as result the required GIM parameters to model PETN have not been measured or derived. Here we use single point measurements of a number of PETN properties to fit the GIM parameters, and then validate this fitting process by predicting the temperature dependent response of PETN and comparing these results to experimental data from the literature.