The ionic salts with super oxidizing ions O2+ and N5+: Potential candidates for high-energy oxidants

As an important component of energetic materials, high-energy oxidant is one of the key materials to improve their energy. The oxidizability of oxidant directly determines the intensity of combustion or explosion reaction. It is generally believed that when the nature of reductant is certain, the stronger the oxidizability, the more intense the reaction. Dioxygenyl cation (O₂⁺) and pentazenium cation (N₅⁺) are two kinds of super oxidizing ions, which oxidizability are comparable to that of fluorine. A series of high energetic ionic salts with O₂⁺, N₅⁺ and various anions as active components are designed, and the results show that: 1) Most ionic salts have appropriate thermodynamic stability, high density (up to 2.201 g/cm³), high enthalpy of formation (up to 1863.234 kJ/mol) and excellent detonation properties (up to 10.83 km/s, 45.9 GPa); 2) The detonation velocity value of O₂ (nitrotetrazole-N-oxides) and O₂B(N₃)₄ exceed 10.0 km/s, and the detonation pressure exceed 45.0 GPa because of the O₂⁺ salts have higher crystal density (g/cm³) and oxygen balance than that of N₅⁺salts; 3) With a higher nitrogen content than O₂⁺, the N₅⁺ salts have higher enthalpy of formation, which exceed 330 kJ/mol than that of O₂⁺ salts; 4) The linear spatial structure of N₅⁺ leads the salts to reduce their density. Encouragingly, this study proves that these super oxidizing ions have the potential to become high-energy oxidants, which could be a theoretical reference for the design of new high energetic materials.

How stable can the pentanitrogen cation be in kinetics?

For the 22 year-old pentanitrogen cation N5+ (01), we surprisingly found that the previously reported transition states (TSs) do not correspond to N2-extrusion. We located the real N2-extrusion TS, which can well reconcile the hitherto remaining inconsistency between the gas-phase and salt-like forms of 01 both in structure and energetics.

From mono-rings to bridged bi-rings to caged bi-rings: a promising design strategy for all-nitrogen high-energy-density materials N10 and N12

Four designed bicyclic all-nitrogen compounds with excellent energetic performance (D: 9878–12 293 m s⁻¹; I_sp: 325–434.60 s) were fully studied.