The quest for greater chemical energy

storage in energetic materials: Grounding

expectations
Cite as: AIP Conference Proceedings 1793, 040023 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4971517
Published Online: 13 January 2017

C. Michael Lindsay, and Mario E. Fajardo

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 The Quest for Greater Chemical Energy Storage in
Energetic Materials: Grounding Expectations
C. Michael Lindsay a) and Mario E. Fajardo

Energetic Materials Branch, Air Force Research Laboratory, 2306 Perimeter Road, Eglin AFB, FL 32542
a)
Corresponding author: c.lindsay@us.af.mil

Abstract. It is well known that the performance of modern energetic materials based on organic chemistry has
plateaued, with only ~ 40% improvements realized over the past half century. This fact has stimulated research on
alternative chemical energy storage schemes in various U.S. government funded “High Energy Density Materials”
(HEDM) programs since the 1950’s. These efforts have examined a wide range of phenomena such as free radical
stabilization, metallic hydrogen, metastable helium, polynitrogens, extended molecular solids, nanothermites, and others.
In spite of the substantial research investments, significant improvements in energetic material performance have not
been forthcoming. This paper discusses the lessons learned in the various HEDM programs, the different degrees of
freedom in which to store energy in materials, and the fundamental limitations and orders of magnitude of the energies
involved. The discussion focuses almost exclusively on the topic of energy density and only mentions in passing other
equally important properties of explosives and propellants such as gas generation and reaction rate.

INTRODUCTION
It surprises many to learn that the most sophisticated military explosives used today are only about a factor of
two higher in performance than the state of the art of over a century ago. [1,2] Similarly, the performance of
chemical rocket propellants has also plateaued since the development of the cryogenic liquid hydrogen/liquid
oxygen system in the mid-20th century. [3] While its specific measure varies with the intended application,
“performance” can generically be considered in the context of an energetic material’s three main functions:
undergoing fast reactions, producing large amounts of high pressure gaseous products, and reacting exothermically.
Organic energetic materials, i.e. containing molecules composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, are
among the most widely used, but have seemingly reached a performance plateau over the past few decades. [1,2]
The desire for improved energetic materials performance has motivated several focused research programs to
examine alternative approaches to storing chemical energy in materials. Substances designed to increase the
exothermicity of their reactions are collectively called High Energy Density Materials (HEDM). The first concerted
HEDM effort was the National Bureau of Standards’ “Free Radicals” program of the 1950’s [4] which sought to
stabilize and trap these normally highly reactive and short lived molecular fragments. In subsequent years, both the
U.S. Air Force [5] and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) [6] sponsored research
programs in this area, culminating in the U.S. Air Force HEDM program spanning the final fifteen years of the 20th
century. [7,8] A wide range of materials and phenomena have been examined in efforts to produce HEDMs,
including: free radical stabilization, metastable helium, metallic hydrogen, polynitrogens, extended molecular
solids, and nanothermites. Despite many decades of research to discover and mature HEDM technology, practical
materials have not been forthcoming. However, these efforts have eliminated a number of possibilities and
produced several “lessons learned” that should be of value to future HEDM efforts.
These HEDM lessons include the following notions. (1) Avoid metastable electronic excited species for long-
term energy storage; the low electron mass facilitates tunneling and other barrier-defeating processes, and
intermolecular interactions in condensed phases provide for numerous additional relaxation mechanisms to those
available to isolated gas-phase species. Thus, the target HEDM system must be on its ground electronic potential

Shock Compression of Condensed Matter - 2015

AIP Conf. Proc. 1793, 040023-1–040023-10; doi: 10.1063/1.4971517
Published by AIP Publishing. 978-0-7354-1457-0/$30.00

040023-1
energy surface (PES). (2) Higher internal energy content in a system correlates with poorer stability. This may be a
consequence of the increasing probability of interactions with excited PES at higher energies resulting in smaller
barriers to relaxation and/or decomposition. (3) While different performance metrics are required for different
applications, the standard heats of reaction (per unit mass and/or per unit volume) of products provide the “fairest”
measure for comparison of chemical energy storage capacities. This is especially true for applications that cannot
take advantage of ambient air as an oxidizer for producing propulsion thrust or explosive blast. (4) Don’t forget to
include the mass of the container, or other required stabilizing “packaging materials” in these energy storage
calculations, especially for high-pressure and/or cryogenic systems. In these examples, small volumes of material
within the overall system may be held in a high potential energy configuration (e.g. a compressed spring) but the
mass of the surrounding packaging dilutes the net energy storage. (5) Finally, the so-called “Free Atom Limit”
appears to provide an upper bound to chemical energy storage in a given system. [9,10]
In what follows we discuss the scientific background required to understand these purported lessons, and to
assess their continuing validity in the light of ongoing scientific and technological progress. We discuss
fundamental concepts of how energy is stored within materials, beginning with a description of the internal degrees
of freedom within an isolated molecule. We rely heavily on the concept of molecular PES reflecting the Born-
Oppenheimer separation of the electronic and nuclear coordinates. We then present arguments on the basic
limitations to the PES inherent in the nature of the chemical elements. We conclude that there do appear to be
fundamental reasons for the plateau in energy observed in organic explosives, and that there is likely not a
tremendous increase (well under 10x energy density improvement) obtainable by moving to other chemistries.

FIGURE 1. The energy orders of magnitude of the intramolecular degrees of freedom in various units of energy
and radiation. It can be shown that their relative values are a result of two dimensionless quantities:  – the
Born-Oppenheimer constant, and  – the fine structure constant. Abbreviations: W = potential energy, elec –
electronic, vib – vibration, rot – rotation, vr – vibration-rotation interaction, s – electron spin, i – nuclear spin,
melecc2 – electron rest mass energy. The large gap between chemical energies (highlighted in red) and nuclear
energies is a direct result of the magnitude of the fine structure constant. Adapted from the work of T. Oka. [11]

040023-2
 MODES OF ENERGY STORAGE WITHIN MOLECULES
Molecules have a limited number of intramolecular degrees of freedom in which to store energy: nuclear spin,
electron spin, and rotational, vibrational, and electronic coordinates, listed in order of increasing energies involved.
While it is conceivable that energy can be stored in atomic/molecular translation (e.g. as molecular kinetic energy in
high temperature systems or in mechanical systems such as a flywheel), such storage at this time appears to be
impractical for energetic material applications, and thus we restrict ourselves to the intramolecular modes.
The order of magnitude of the energies associated with each degree of freedom is not trivial or arbitrary. On the
contrary, it can be shown that the relative magnitudes of the various degrees of freedom depend on two
dimensionless parameters: the Born-Oppenheimer constant,  = (melectron/mnucleus)1/4 ~ 0.1, [12] and Sommerfeld’s
fine structure constant,  = e2 / ħc ~ 1/137. [13] The former, of course, varies with the particular atoms involved,
and the latter can be interpreted as the ratio of the speed of the lowest energy electron in the Bohr model of the
hydrogen atom and the speed of light. [14] Figure 1 plots the relative magnitudes of each degree of freedom in
various energy and radiation units, as well as the dependence on  and , spanning ~1012 orders of magnitude. The
derivation of these relationships is beyond the scope of this paper, but readers are referred to the beautiful
explanation provided by Oka. [11] While the relative magnitudes of these two dimensionless parameters has, so far,
escaped explanation and appears to be a fundamental property of the Universe, their values have a profound effect
on why the various degrees of freedom within atoms and molecules have the energies they do. For instance, lower
energy modes are available for exploration through excitation of vibrational or rotational degrees of freedom, but
these energies are (respectively) two and four orders of magnitude less than that of the electronic degrees of freedom
on account of the relative masses of the electrons and nuclei. Analogously, the value of the fine structure constant is
directly responsible for the gap of ~ 105 between chemical energies (i.e. electronic energies, highlighted in red in
Fig. 1) and nuclear energies. Efforts to span this large gap should keep in mind the fundamental limitations of the
energies achievable by the fundamental particles using the standard physics. Given the sensitivities and challenges
associated with nuclear reactions, we restrict our attention to the other available degrees of freedom.

MOLECULAR POTENTIAL ENERGY SURFACES

All of the intramolecular degrees of freedom are
coupled through the electromagnetic force, but
because of the approximately four orders of
magnitude, 4, difference in the relative dynamics of
the electrons and the nuclei we can approximate that
the electrons instantaneously adapt to changes in the
position of the nuclei, thereby permitting the Born-
Oppenheimer separation of the energies associated
with the nuclei and electrons. The result of this
separation is the concept of the electronic potential
energy surface (PES), which is a multidimensional
energy function of the configuration of the nuclei; i.e.
(3N-6)-dimensional where N is the number of atoms
in the molecule. [15] Figure 2 shows an example
surface for the H + O + H system in a reduced 2-
dimensional representation where the angle between
the three atoms is fixed at 104.5, the equilibrium
value of the water molecule. Two electronic states
are shown here: the lowest energy, X 1A1 state, [16] FIGURE 2. The ground (X 1A1 Ref. [16]) and first excited state
with a global minimum in the “molecular water” (A 1B1 Ref. [17]) PES of the H + H + O system. The actual
configuration, and the first excited A 1B1 state, [17] surfaces are 3-dimensional and are reduced here to 2-dimensions
which is dissociative into H + OH fragments. Points by fixing the H - O - H angle to 104.5, the equilibrium value for
on the PES where the gradients with respect to all the water. The ground state has a minimum energy in the “molecular
water” configuration, 927 kJ/mol below the Free Atom Limit.
nuclear coordinates are zero are called “stationary
The first excited state is dissociative, that is, is most stable in the
points.” Two examples are the global minimum on H + O-H configuration. The energy zero has been defined here
the ground state PES, and the saddle point “transition as the potential energy at the Free Atom Limit.

040023-3
state” between the two H + OH and HO + H dissociative exit channels. This transition state on the excited surface is
~ 300 kJ/mol above the H + OH asymptotic energy, and can be thought of as the barrier to hydrogen exchange. The
H + OH exit channels are examples of internuclear configurations in which some of the atoms are still bound
together into stable fragments; such configurations include reaction intermediates in close proximity as well as
separated final product species. The difference in energy between the molecular water global minimum on the
ground PES and the Free Atom Limit (i.e. H and H and O atoms completely separated) is the molecular bonding
energy. The difference in energy between the dissociated H + OH asymptotic energy and the Free Atom Limit is the
bonding energy of the OH radical. In this case, the total bonding energy of water is 927 kJ/mol, and in the first OH
bond ~ 446 kJ/mol. Said another way, the exothermic chemical reaction of H + O + H  H2O releases 927 kJ/mol
and occurs without a barrier.1
It is possible to greatly increase the internal energy of an atom or molecule by exciting the electronic degrees of
freedom all the way up to (and past) the ionization limit. However, such electronically excited states can relax and
dissipate this energy by a variety of radiative and non-radiative processes, usually on timescales that are far too short
for practical long term energy storage. For example, the lifetimes associated with radiative relaxation processes
(e.g. the spontaneous emission of a photon) are described by “Fermi’s Golden Rule” [18] and vary widely from
~10-8 s for a fully allowed atomic resonance to ~103 s for “symmetry forbidden” transitions. The longest known
excited atomic state radiative lifetime is 7870 s for the doubly-forbidden radiative relaxation of the metastable
helium He* 23S1 state, which lies 1910 kJ/mol above the He ground state. [19] Another well-known example is
metastable singlet delta oxygen O2 a1g with a radiative lifetime of 4430 s; this species is responsible for one of the
strongest features in the day and night airglow emission spectrum of the upper atmosphere. [20]

FIGURE 3. A selection of the internuclear configurations and transition states of TNT thought to be involved in thermal
decomposition. Also shown is the apparent activation energy barrier (140 kJ/mol) as measured by isothermal differential
scanning calorimetry. [21] The heat of detonation of TNT is measured to be 1038 kJ/mol [22] and results in a mixture of
small-molecule gases and condensed carbon. The actual detonation products are not represented by a single internuclear
configuration, but by a statistical distribution of products with fractional molar ratios. [22] Figure adapted from reference
[23] and reprinted with permission from X.-F. Chen, et al., Theor. Chem. Acc. 127, 327 (2010), copyright 2010 Springer
Science and Business Media.

1
More precisely, the free energies of the internuclear configurations are located slightly above the potential energy surface due to the zero point
energy (ZPE) of the molecular vibrations, a quantum mechanical effect of confining the nuclei. For H2O and OH the ZPE is 55.4 kJ/mol, and
22.1 kJ/mol, respectively. [24,25] This effect is not usually influential in energetic materials, but the consequences can occasionally be observed
in such phenomena as the kinetic isotope effect. [26]

040023-4
 However, while these metastable electronically excited species may show remarkable stability in the gas phase,
such low density systems do not possess sufficient energy/volume to be of interest as energetic materials. Energy
storage schemes based on stabilized collections of separated ionic species run into similar difficulties. [27] All
previous attempts to increase the volumetric energy density to useful levels by incorporating electronically excited
species into condensed phases have run afoul of the fact that intermolecular interactions break the atomic/molecular
symmetry responsible for the metastability, or otherwise make available new relaxation pathways (e.g. He* + He*
autoionization) that severely limit the energy storage duration. The conclusion seems to be, after many decades of
diverse experimentation, that practical storage of chemical energy using excited electronic states is not possible. We
therefore restrict our discussion for the remainder of this paper to the potential energy of a system in its ground
electronic state.
Given the difficulty of visualizing the full (3N-6)-dimensional PES for a polyatomic molecule such as
trinitrotoluene (TNT, C7H5N3O6, N = 21) chemists often resort to simplified and abstracted representations showing
only the most important features of the PES. Figure 3 shows an energy level diagram for the TNT system in the
ground electronic state. [23] This representation, though highly simplified and approximate, conveys a sense of the
various reaction pathways between important internuclear configurations on the TNT PES, and the interconnecting
transition states involved in thermal decomposition. Superimposed onto these energy levels and transition states is
the “apparent” activation barrier of 140 kJ/mol, [21] as well as the actual statistical product distribution observed
from the detonation reaction. [22] Going from the TNT molecule to the detonation products is observed to release
1038 kJ/mol or 4.6 kJ/g. This begs an important question: how does this detonation energy relate to the total
amount of chemical energy that can be stored, in principle, using seven carbon atoms, five hydrogen atoms, three
nitrogen atoms, and six oxygen atoms? To answer that question, it is helpful to first consider the formalism of
standard heats of reaction associated with oxidizing atoms in their various forms.

STANDARD HEATS OF REACTION AND OXIDATION OF THE ELEMENTS

The amount of chemical energy released by a reacting energetic material, i.e. the difference in enthalpy of the
products and reactants, can be calculated most conveniently from tabulated data using Hess’s Law: [28]

Hr0 = pnpHf0(p) - rnrHf0(r), (1)

where Hf0 is a standard heat of formation, n is the number of moles of each species, and “p” and “r” designate
products and reactants, respectively. For most practical energetic materials, most of the energy is released by the
formation of very stable (i.e. large negative heat of formation) molecular products, such as H2O, CO, and CO2,
and/or condensed phase metal oxides such as solid or liquid Al2O3. A notable exception is the energy released by
the formation of molecular nitrogen N≡N with its strong triple bond, which, as the prevalent form of the element
under standard conditions, is assigned a heat of formation of zero by convention. Thus, most of the most exothermic
steps in energetic material reactions involve the oxidation of the constituent elements, and in order to understand the
magnitudes of these processes it is helpful to consider the oxidation of the pure elements.

040023-5
 FIGURE 4. Relative heats of combustion of (a) the various allotropes of carbon, and (b) aluminum particles of various
sizes. The difference in energy between the various forms of the reactants is often referred to as “strain energy” or “surface
energy,” and is a small fraction of the energy available from the full oxidation of the free element. Enthalpies of formation
are from references [29] and [30].

Figure 4a shows the heats of combustion, and the standard heats of formation, of the various allotropes of
carbon. [29] We see that burning carbon in the forms of graphite, diamond, and fullerene to produce carbon dioxide
releases 393, 395, and 431 kJ/mol (per mole of CO2), respectively. All of these allotropes are initially in the same
+0 oxidation state, and once reacted, are in the +4 oxidation state. The different combustion energies can be
interpreted as being due to differences in the hybridization of the C-C bonds, or alternatively as “strain energy.”
This energy is relatively small in this case with the best performing example, fullerene, having less than 10%
additional combustion energy due to the strain. Indeed, bond strain does increase the heat of formation of the
reactant, i.e. provides more stored chemical energy, but it is still only a fraction of the energy available for release
through oxidation. Khoury, Goddard, and Tam comprehensively examined stored ring strain energies in a wide
range of organic compounds, and found that the highest strain energies were found in small unsaturated polycyclic
cages, amounting to at most ~ 85 kJ/mol (carbon). [31]
Figure 4b shows the heats of combustion, and the standard heats of formation, of pure solid aluminum and
aluminum particles of various sizes, down to atomic aluminum. [30, 32]. Note that these calculations do not include
the effects of the ~ 3-nm-thick native oxide found on real aluminum surfaces. As the aluminum particle size
decreases, there is a slight increase in the heat of formation, commonly ascribed to “surface energy,” and
consequently there is slightly more energy released upon combustion. As with the strain energy for the carbon
allotropes, the extra surface energy of the particles is a small fraction of the total heat of combustion of aluminum.
These and analogous observations lead us to the conclusion that strain and surface energies can contribute to the
stored chemical energy, but that they are relatively small in comparison to the energy of oxidation.

THE FREE ATOM LIMIT

In contrast to the small increases shown in Figure 4 for the strained organic and small metal particle systems, the
oxidation energies of the free atoms are much larger. For instance, over 2.5 times more energy is released in
oxidizing free carbon atoms compared to carbon in one of its allotropes. Similarly, free aluminum atoms release
40% more energy in combustion compared to solid aluminum. Figure 5 compares the oxidation energies of the
elements for the first four rows of the periodic table, where the size of each element’s box (black boxes) is

040023-6
 FIGURE 5. The “Pyromaniac’s Periodic Table” where the length of a side of each element’s box (black) is proportional to
the energy of oxidation per unit volume from the element’s standard state. The dashed blue boxes indicate the energy of
oxidation relative to the Free Atom Limit for the first three rows, indicating that much of the chemical energy possible, in
principle, for oxidizing beryllium, boron, and carbon atoms is tied up in the covalent or metallic bonding of the standard
material. Calculations were performed using standard thermodynamic data from references [25,33,34].
proportional to the heat of combustion per unit volume of each element in its standard state (i.e. graphite for carbon,
metallic aluminum, H2 for hydrogen, etc…). The dashed blue boxes depict the oxidation energies for each element
as free atoms (however at the same volumetric density as for the standard state) which is in each case larger than that
for the standard state. The standard state materials vary widely in the nature of their bonding, including van der
Waals bonded molecular solids and covalent/metallic bonded atomic solids, but the trend is the same: more energy
is released during combustion when each system is in its free atom configuration compared to its standard state.
Readers are referred to a USAF HEDM program era publication which reviews the literature on trapping free atoms
in cryogenic solid hydrogen for propulsion applications. [35]
The notion of the Free Atom Limit to the energy content of a material appears to have been proposed first by
astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, [9] stating that the highest energy configuration of any chemical system, not restricted
to oxidation reactions, is realized when the atoms are not bonded. Windsor further refined this point by stating:

“One may ask what is the maximum amount of energy one can store in a molecule. The answer is
surprisingly simple and at the same time paradoxical. The limit is reached when you have a
system of free atoms…” [10]

Indeed, this statement is so simple that it is difficult to refute by counter-example, or to prove a priori. It seems
obvious that the act of binding atoms together in any way must take them to a lower energy configuration on the
ground state molecular PES than the asymptotic energy of the ground state free atoms themselves. Bound
electronically excited states can and do exist at energies well above this ground state asymptote, but, as discussed
above, such states inevitably relax spontaneously on unacceptably short timescales for use as practical energetic
materials. Despite not being proven rigorously, the Free Atom Limit hypothesis has not been violated to our
knowledge, and provides an explicit upper bound on the energy that can be stored for any given chemical system.
We now can revisit the question of the maximum stored energy attainable from the “TNT” system posed above.
By adding the heats of formation of the seven carbon atoms, five hydrogen atoms, three nitrogen atoms, and six
oxygen atoms, we find that the heat of formation of the free atom state is +9039 kJ/mol (of TNT). Given that the
sum of the heats of formation for the detonation products is -1129 kJ/mol, the theoretical maximum chemical energy
that can be released reacting any configuration of C7H5N3O6 to form the detonation products is -10,144 kJ/mol or
44.7 kJ/g. Compared to the measured TNT heat of detonation of -1038 kJ/mol, we find that ~90% of the potential
energy is tied up in the process of bonding the atoms together into the explosive molecule.

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 HIGH PRESSURE ENERGY STORAGE
The one remaining logical objection we see to the Free Atom Limit hypothesis is the possibility of driving the
system to a higher energy configuration by the application of extremely high pressures. Indeed, the repulsive walls
of both the intramolecular PES, such as the one depicted above for water in Figure 2, and of the water-water
intermolecular PES extend to very high energies -- well above the free atom asymptote -- as the internuclear
separations are reduced towards zero. It is also well known that the PdV work performed on a compressed material
can become comparable to chemical bonding energies at the pressures attained using modern diamond anvil cells.
Again, as mentioned in the Introduction, a “fair” evaluation of the energy stored under such conditions should
include the mass of the diamond anvil cell, or other apparatus, used to compress and confine the energetic material
at high pressure. So we judge that this example does not contradict the Free Atom Limit hypothesis.
One of the most “hoped-for” experimental results is ambient pressure recovery of a metastable energetic material
produced at high pressures, such as a metallic or polymeric phase of nitrogen. [36,37] However, the Free Atom
Limit conjecture rejects the notion that the recovered material would have an internal energy above the free atom
asymptote. It is much more likely that any such recovered material will have some different (perhaps “unusual”)
bonding arrangement of otherwise “normal” covalent bonds, as is the case for the most often cited example of
ambient pressure metastable material recovery: diamond. This unusual bonding arrangement should behave much
like the “strained bonds” discussed above, and likely carry the same magnitude of additional stored energy.
As a concrete example, we consider the specific heats of formation (energy/mass) of various nitrogen species,
beginning with the molecular N2 standard state at zero energy, and nitrogen atoms at Hf0[N(g)] = 33.8 kJ/g,
tetrahedral N4 at Hf0[Td N4(g)] = 20.1 kJ/g, and octahedral N8 at Hf0[Oh N8(g)] = 15.2 kJ/g. [38] It seems likely
that the heat of formation of a recovered polymeric nitrogen material would also be less than the free atom
asymptote of 33.8 kJ/g, which is only  7 times the specific heat of detonation of TNT.
Another example is the carbon - oxygen system (molar ratio of 1:1), where compression of CO above 5 GPa
has been demonstrated to produce a stable form of “polymeric carbon monoxide” in a configuration with density of
as high as 1.65 g/cm3 and an energy density as high as 8 kJ/g when reacting to carbon dioxide and graphite. [39]
Analysis of the recovered energetic material reveals a mixed cyclic-ether and lactone-like backbone [39,40]
consisting of a series of single and double bonded oxygen and carbon atoms. While higher energy than carbon
monoxide, such a configuration is well below the energy one obtains from reacting carbon and oxygen atoms to the
same final products, 41.5 kJ/g, and thus is well below the asymptotic Free Atom Limit.

CONCLUSIONS
We have collected and discussed five important “lessons learned” from research performed under prior HEDM
programs. (1) Avoid metastable electronic excited species for long-term energy storage. (2) Higher internal energy
content in a system correlates with poorer stability. (3) Standard heats of reaction per unit mass of products provide
the “fairest” measure for comparison of chemical energy storage capacities. (4) Include the mass of any required
stabilizing “packaging materials” in these energy storage calculations. (5) The Free Atom Limit hypothesis provides
an upper bound to chemical energy storage in a given system.
We also reviewed fundamental concepts associated with molecular bonding in order to better understand these
lessons, and to gain additional perspectives on the energy densities available for chemical energy storage. In doing
so, we uncovered additional key messages that should ground our expectations in our quest to discovery higher
energy density materials. First, there are fundamental reasons behind the large gap in the energy content available in
conventional chemical energetic materials and nuclear materials; this attributable to the magnitude of the fine
structure constant. Second, additional chemical energy can be stored as “strain” in a molecule or material via
unusual bonding schemes, but this energy is small in comparison to the oxidation energy. Third, ambient pressure
recovery of energetic materials produced at high pressures should not violate the Free Atom Limit hypothesis.
Thus, we suggest that a critical first-principles evaluation of the validity of the Free Atom Limit hypothesis
would be valuable to future HEDM efforts. If it can be refuted, then perhaps greater advances into the gap between
chemical and nuclear energies are indeed possible. If not, then it is difficult even to identify plausible “10× TNT”
energy storage candidates.

040023-8
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by research grant 3002NW from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research;
Program Officer Dr. Michael Berman.

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