Nitrogen-rich organic compounds are often highly energetic materials, easily detonated on impact or other shock and releasing nitrogen gas explosively. Making stable analogues of such compounds is now possible thanks to work by Jean’ne Shreeve, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, and colleagues.

They have synthesized guanidinium, triazolium, and tetrazolium dinitromethanide salts. These compounds have nitrogen content and so good detonation properties, but they are relatively insensitive to impact and so while useful as energetic materials do not suffer from the need to be handled very careful as does perhaps the most infamous of related nitrogen compounds, trinitroglycerine. These ionic compounds also have the added advantage of low vapor pressure.

The materials were synthesized from their corresponding N-substituted guanidinium, triazolium, and tetrazolium halide salts with silver dinitromethanide in ice-cooled methanol.

• Impact insensitive dinitromethanide salts,
  J. M. Shreeve, Ling He, Damon A. Parrish, Guo-Hong Tao,
  Chem. Commun. 2013.
  DOI: 10.1039/C3CC46518G