Self-assembly of spherically hollow ammonium perchlorate architectures: Preparation, characterization, and thermal decomposition performance.

[Display omitted] • A novel spherical AP architectures was constructed. • DMSO serves as a solvent while OA is an antisolvent. • AP crystal nucleus grows on the DMSO droplet surface. • The thermal decomposition performance was improved. Ammonium perchlorate (AP) is the most common oxidant of composite solid propellants, and its morphology significantly affects its performance. The acquisition of regular spherical APs has always been an urgent but challenging task. In this work, spherical APs with hollow architectures were prepared by adopting a fast and facile antisolvent crystallization strategy, in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and oleic acid (OA) were used as the solvent and antisolvent, respectively. The OA antisolvent could temporally stabilize the AP-DMSO droplets and form metastable microreactors for AP crystal growth on the OA/DMSO droplet interfaces. The as-obtained AP products presented well-preserved spherically hollow architectures assembled by abundant small subunits. Crystallization supersaturation was determined to be the main influencing factor. High supersaturation yielded large spherically hollow APs assembled from rod-like subunits, whereas low supersaturation obtained small spherically hollow APs assembled from ellipsoid-like subunits. Then, the thermal decomposition performance of representative spherical APs with hollow architectures was investigated. The proposed method not only provided a rapid synthetic route to high-quality spherical APs but could also be generalized in the preparation of other spherical crystalline materials. The spherical APs with hollow architectures are expected to have wide application prospects in the field of composite solid propellants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]