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The oxidation of Al-particles down to nano-scale was investigated by TG, SEM and in-situ X-ray diffraction. Al particles are usually coated by a 2 ± 4 nm layer of Al 2 O 3 which can be derived from the degree of weight increase on complete oxidation by TGcurves. The low temperature oxidation of Al particles occurs at least in two steps. The first step builds a layer of 6 to 10 nm thickness composed of crystallites of the same size independent on the initial particle size. This reaction is dominated by chemical kinetics and converts a substantial fraction of the particle if the particle sizes decrease below 1 mm, an effect carefully to be taken into account for nano-particles because of safety reasons. The second step combines diffusion and chemical reaction and proceeds therefore slowly, the slower the bigger the particles are. The kinetic parameters of these two steps can be obtained by a model taking into account both reaction steps, chemical kinetics and diffusion for spherical particles when fitting it to TG-curves. X-ray diffraction shows that particles smaller than 1 mm build gand q-Al 2 O 3 in the first step with nano-crystalline structures which are then transformed to a-Al 2 O 3 .

In combustion research, nitromethane is an important nitro-compounded liquid propellant offering high performance. Additionally it can be used as a model substance for understanding mechanisms of combustion of solid propellants. The objectives of investigations were the burning behaviour and the¯ame spectrum in the UVaVIS spectral range because of the appearance of strong radical emissions also present in¯ames of other energetic materials. The evaluation is based on a detailed chemical kinetics and a linear combustion model including a reduced mechanism.

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