Stabilizer Reaction and Consumption in Nitrocellulose Containing Substances—Parametric Versus Mechanistic Descriptions and Modeling

With nitrocellulose (NC) containing substances as propellants, stabilizers must be used to protect the NC‐part against the autocatalytic decomposition. To model the stabilizer consumption correctly, the production of NOx by NC has to be regarded as well as the bimolecular reaction between NOx and the stabilizer. The production of NOx from NC must be explicitly included, because the concentration of it is not constant with time. The elaboration of the corresponding reaction scheme ends up in an equation for the bimolecular stabilizer reaction. The model contains both reaction rate constants of the two reactions of the scheme, which is a general and necessary condition for correct kinetic modeling of stabilizer consumption. Examples of the application of the obtained models are given and discussed. Thereby the stabilizing capability of the consecutive products of the primary stabilizer are successively considered and the development of the autocatalytic active product monitored. Finally, the quality of modeling the data is assessed with so‐called information criteria. Two types are used “Akaike information criterion” (AIC) and “Bayes information criterion” (BIC). These methods evaluate from a set of applied models the one which provides a description with the least loss of information regarding the full information, which is the data itself.