There is a further increasing demand on improvements of performance and safety of explosives. Regarding the latter, in particular the fields of "safety of manufacture and handling", "chemical and ballistic stability/functionality", "toxicity", and "reduced vulnerability/sensitiveness" have to be respected. With propellants, performance is increased by different measures, including new formulations, burning rate moderation and increased loading density. Attention has to be paid to the improvement of stability and the replacement of toxic components. New formulations and production processes allow to markedly reduce the sensitiveness also for nitrocellulose-based propellants. Primary explosives suffer from their extreme sensitiveness - new developments go towards primary explosive-free initiators, detonators or other initiation techniques (e.g. exploding bridgewire, exploding foil igniter, laser beam ignition). In case of main charge explosives, "new" substances with either improved performance or reduced sensitiveness become popular. Organic substances with high density, as many energetic groups as possible and additional internal energy by strongly strained molecular structure should offer a further performance gain. For pyrotechnics, only marginal improvements appear to be possible with conventional micro particles, whereas nanotechnology seems to be able to double the performance of certain pyrotechnics and, at the same time, to increase the safety level by a factor of ten.
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