Defense Department awards $1.4M to VCU professor to study process leading to explosions

The Department of Defense has awarded two grants totaling nearly $1.4 million to a Virginia Commonwealth University chemistry professor to study the initial steps of decomposition in “energetic molecules” that leads to explosions.

Katharine Moore Tibbetts, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Humanities and Sciences, received a five-year, $1 million Army Research Office Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, as well as $335,000 from the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program to purchase equipment.

Tibbetts, who also received $60,000 last year from the Army Research Office to conduct initial research, is studying the dissociation dynamics of energetic molecules, which are chemical compounds used in explosives and propellants that have large amounts of energy stored in their chemical bonds.

The energy is released when the chemical bonds are broken during detonation of explosives and ignition of propellants. The goal of Tibbetts’ research is to identify the processes leading to the first bond-breaking event in energetic molecules that initiates detonation.