I pity the Chinese nationalists and military enthusiasts who go gaga over something without even understanding it and make some really weird claims about it. Let us see how :-
The Actual Research done by Zang et al.
No one bothered to read the actual research papers and tried to understand the real contribution of the group.
These papers are :-
1. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/374 (Paper 1)
In this paper the research group presented a salt of pentazolate ion in bulk which was surprisingly stable at 117 degree Celcius. Before this pentazolate ion was seen in spectrometry, solution and under extreme pressure (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentazole). This was the first time someone has prepared a salt which was not only stable at room temprature but also remarkably stable at higher temperature. The author mentioned that it has a potential for a high explosive component.
The remarkable feat in this research was not discovering a massively powerful explosive but stabilizing a theoretically extremely unstable molecule/ion.
Read the actual comments by their peer chemical engineers
http://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/14/pentazole-first-synthesis-one-unhappy-molecule-10854
2. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201701070/full (Paper 2)
In this paper the authors presented a Metal - Pentazolate complex which was stable at room temperature. It is one of the very few such molecule. The authors also studied its structure and thermal stability. No where in the paper the specific energy of explosive ( say X Joules / mg) was determined ( I will cover this a bit more later).
The remarkable feat in this research was a high nitrogen compound which is stable at room temperature. The author also determined it contained more energy than their previously discovered compound by DSC.
What Chinese Military Enthusiasts Claimed
10-100x higher than TNT explosive discovered by Chinese
Nothing of this sort is covered in these research papers. In fact these research papers do not even talk about specific energy of the molecules they have synthesized. All they have covered which is REMOTELY related to this is Thermal Analysis, namely TG-DSC analysis for which we have been given three graphs :-
From the Second Paper (for Cobalt complex of cyclo-N5 anion)
View attachment 392349
View attachment 392351
From the first paper (DTG DSC TG graph of (N5)6(H3O)3(NH4)4Cl )
View attachment 392352
All of these plots indicate the kind of decomposition the molecule goes. To actually calculate specific heat of decomposition in J/g, you will need to find the apparatus constant of the equipment by heating a known mass of indium or other sample and comparing the area under curve of that with values in literature. Then you can calculate the specific heat of decomposition by
Hdecom = Area under peak * Apparatus constant.
Now since we do not have access to the equipment nor we have apparatus constant given in these papers the claimed Specific Energy wrt TNT are just wild guesses with no relation to reality.
Further damning proof to this is the theoretical Energy density of N8 and Cubic Gauche Nitrogen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octaazacubane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_nitrogen#Cubic_gauche
Which are respectively 22.9 KJ / g and 33 KJ /g being 5 and 7.5 times more powerful compared to TNT. Out of these Cubic Gauche Nitrogen is though to be theoretically most energy dense non-nuclear material predicted. (
http://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1814074)
How come the molecules mentioned above are more energetic than that is still beyond me. It is noteworthy that original researcher (Zeng et al) never claimed this.
