Twin Screw Extrusion of Aluminized Thermobaric Explosives

The manufacturing of advanced explosives containing large amounts of metal powders to improve performance, such as PAX-3, have proven difficult to transition into production. Current manufacturing processes have had low yield which results in a high cost per unit and questionable product uniformity. Over the past year the Twin Screw Extruder (TSE) Team has been investigating the use of a TSE machine to mix and extrude an aluminum base explosive, (PAX-3). The TSE team has successfully demonstrated this concept on the live formulation (02-02-06). This material was processed using a smaller concentration of green solvents in comparison to the conventional batch processing and is more uniform. The TSE method uses a base material consisting of coated HMX (PAX-2 or PAX-2A), made by conventional means, and reprocessing it into its aluminized corollary. This manufacturing process is extremely flexible allowing for the reformulation of a base material into a number of different explosives with tailored characteristics. By using this new technology the cost of manufacturing these explosives would be reduced by $10 to $60 per pound depending upon how successful current batch process improvements are. The organic solvents lost to the environment and waste treatment requirements will also be greatly reduced. It is anticipated that the concentration of the organic solvents to be employed will be reduced by as much as 50% compared to traditional batch processes. It will also be economically practical to recover and reprocess scrap and out-of-specification explosives.