High-frequency mechanical excitation can induce heating within energetic materials and may lead to advances in explosives detection and defeat. In order to examine the nature of this mechanically induced heating, samples of an elastic binder (Sylgard 184) were embedded with inert and energetic particles placed in a fixed spatial pattern and were subsequently excited with an ultrasonic transducer at discrete frequencies from 100 kHz to 20 MHz. The temperature and velocity responses of the sample surfaces suggest that heating due to frictional effects occurred near the particles at excitation frequencies near the transducer resonance of 215 kHz. An analytical solution involving a heat point source was used to estimate heating rates and temperatures at the particle locations in this frequency region. Heating located near the sample surface at frequencies near and above 1 MHz was attributed to viscoelastic effects related to the surface motion of the samples. At elevated excitation parameters near the transducer resonance frequency, embedded particles of ammonium perchlorate and cyclotetramethylene-tetranitramine were driven to chemical decomposition
