Thread: White powder recipe?

Retrieved: 12/12/2014
Last Post: 09/09/2012

[cherry picked]

I have heard of a BP substitute that can easily and cheaply be made called "White powder" mentioned here (and other places) multiple times now, but I can't find any record of how it is made. It's potassium nitrate and sugar, I do believe.

colonelhogan44
09-17-2012

What was the recipe you used? Just a stoichiometric blend of sucrose and KNO3? I'm assuming you dissolved both components together, drove off the water to a paste and then pushed it through a screen?

Boz330
09-17-2012

I tried replacing the sulfur with sugar in a batch but just ended up with a very anemic BP. I know that doesn't answer your question but that was my experience. Supposedly you can leave the sulfur out and use straight CC but it raises the ignition temperature by 100C.

colonelhogan44
09-17-2012

If someone has a recipe, I'd like to see it. I used a sugar KNO3 mix for rocket engines a few years back, and it made a lot of power in that application.

perotter
09-17-2012

I'll PM you the recipe latter tonite. I'm very short on time right now.

In cartridge rifles the muzzle vel will be the same as for BP. It doesn't work well or at all in muzzleloader that are not of the inline type from what a friend has shown me.

I'll Make Mine
09-17-2012

Substituting the sugar for the charcoal is the way to go -- you still need the sulfur (igniter), saltpeter (oxidizer), and the sugar becomes the fuel. Complicating this, however, is that sugar contains carbon, hydrogen, and a little oxygen, compared to charcoal that's about 98% carbon with just a hint of hydrogen (in hydrocarbon residues that make real charcoal better than "activated", graphite, or anthracite) -- so the ratio of fuel to oxidizer needs to change.

Hydrogen is much lighter than carbon, but still wants half as much oxygen per unit; net result is, mass for mass, sugar wants more oxygen than charcoal -- so you'll need less fuel (sugar) than you would in black powder, but not a lot less. Instead of the classic 75/15/10 using charcoal, I'd probably start with 77/13/10 or 79/12/9, test, and refine.

In the end, you'll still produce a powder that fouls badly (unburned sugar is much messier than unburned charcoal), and you don't learn much; white powder was tried and abandoned a couple hundred years ago. If civilization has collapsed and you have sulfur and saltpeter, you can make charcoal more easily than you can find white sugar.

perotter
09-17-2012

It don't need the sulfur to work. The standard WP is 66.5 KNO3 & 33.5 table sugar by weight.

Combustion make:
NUMBER MOLS GAS AND CONDENSED= 2.2520 0.3283

A 79/12/9 makes less gas.
Combustion makes:
NUMBER MOLS GAS AND CONDENSED= 1.3510 0.3259

Get the GUIPEP software. It truly cuts down on the time & money for working out these things.

Sugar was too expensive and rare to use for this until a few decades ago.

I'll Make Mine
09-18-2012

Making less gas is less of a disadvantage than burning too slowly; the sulfur ignites more readily than the sugar and will let combustion spread through the powder much more quickly than is the case without it. The sulfurless version works well enough for rocket propellant (aside from the serious hazard of cooking a fuel-oxidizer mixture), but the sulfured version will be much closer to a rifle propellant.

As for cost of sugar, the military has never worried that much about cost; if white powder had been better than black, or even as good, it would have been used (the French used stuff called ammonpulver in WWI, it was terrible, but they could synthesize the oxidizer when they couldn't get real saltpeter and had a shortage of the strong acids needed to make smokeless propellant). And white sugar wasn't rare, even going back to the 17th century (though it was expensive then, because it was produced mostly by human labor, before there was a significant slave population to do the grunt work). Simply put, white powder wasn't used because it was so greatly inferior to black powder.

perotter
09-19-2012

The main user of ammonpulver in WW1 was Austria. The Germans may have used some. It was made & sold on the commercial market before WW1.

The biggest problem with it was from the phase change when the temperature changes. Although someone had discovered in the 1890's how to prevent this, the word never got out. DuPont worked on perfecting it into the 1920s (read their patents), because the smokeless powers used at that time weren't all that good.

Now that it is widely known how to phase stabilize ammonpulver, there is some interest in it again. Even Olin has worked with it as a propellant recently (read their patents). It is the simplest smokeless powder to make, but the burn rate is on the slow side.