PERC

Banner image: Silver salts, a lead-free explosive PERC researchers developed in collaboration with the Army Research Laboratory.

The Purdue Energetics Research Center (PERC) is the largest academic research laboratory in the world focused on energetic materials — propellants, explosives and pyrotechnics — which are becoming increasingly important in national defense. A key mission of the center is to meet the national need to make, test, detect, deploy and defeat next-generation energetic materials.

PERC’s research portfolio is sponsored by a large number of domestic federal agencies, including the Army Research Office, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and many related Department of Defense and Department of Energy laboratories.

The Purdue center, established in 2017, also is a premier source of engineering talent for a broad range of partners in industry and government, with special emphasis on the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security.

PERC is a collection of roughly 160 faculty, staff and students, who share labs and experimental and computational resources across six buildings at Purdue, working on more than $80 million in current open research contracts.

The researchers’ efforts span many orders of magnitude in scale, from individual molecules to manufacturing systems, and including both experimental and computational projects. In general, computational and modeling work is coupled with experimental work across all scales, providing fertile ground for validating theory and predicting performance.

The synergy between PERC’s modeling and experimental work allows rapid progress in both areas.

Modeling work describes the behavior of energetic materials and the processes that make them. These studies range from molecular dynamics studies of hot spot formation in stressed energetic crystals to the solid mechanics of energetic composites to the behavior of energetic powders during processing. The researchers also pursue computational approaches for advanced control and optimization of manufacturing of energetics, including continuous crystallization, filtration, and drying; synthesis; and formulation.

Experimental work involves synthesis of energetics, fuels and binders; characterization and testing of new molecules and formulations; creation of new formulations and new formulating schemes; advanced manufacturing (including additive manufacturing and continuous manufacturing); continuous crystallization, filtration and drying; comprehensive optical diagnosis of combustion and post-detonation fireballs; high-rate mechanics studies of energetics behavior; assessment of energetic interactions with acoustic, mechanical and electrical insults; and discovery and utilization of novel reactive species and structures to enhance the performance of energetic formulations.

PERC has accomplished much in its four years.

The center has launched three successful companies in the last several years, including Next Offset Solutions, Level 6 Engineering, and Adranos.

Under a three-year agreement announced in August 2020, PERC is helping the Army enhance its technology associated with energetic materials. Although the modern military uses such new technologies as advanced computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics, hypersonic aviation and biotechnology, energetic materials remain the key components in many Army munition systems. Energetics research is critical for the U.S. armed forces to achieve priorities set out in the 2018 National Defense Strategy.

In the immediate future, PERC is poised to pursue the continuous, modern manufacturing (including additive manufacturing) of key molecules that are essential to our nation’s arsenal but for which there is no stable domestic source. This work will involve new synthetic routes for energetic molecules and new reaction engineering schemes to implement them. It also will include implementing continuous crystallization, filtration, and drying, as well as new formulation methods.