Recycling of explosives from obsolete medium caliber ammunition

摘要

Many countries in Europe reduced their armed forces after the fall of the Berlin wall. As a consequence there were enormous quantities of ammunition to dispose of. Not only the reduction of armed forces, but also the limited lifetime of ammunition and rapid advances in technology, make it necessary to destroy hundreds of thousands of tons of energetic material every year. Increasingly severe environmental laws no longer permit the traditional methods of dumping, or open burning, or open detonation. New approaches are needed. In this paper the safe and economic disposal of obsolete medium caliber ammunition is discussed. This type of ammunition contains different types of energetic components. The two main parts are the propulsion part and the warhead. The propellant consists basically of nitrocellulose and can be removed very easily from the ammunition. There are different possibilities of recycling. Old propellant is used in small quantities for hunting ammunition or as civil explosives in mining. But not all the ammunition can be disposed of in this way. In this paper, on-going research work about the conversion of propellant into fertilizer and its use as a basic component for varnish is presented. The most common explosive in warheads is TNT. The recycling process is well established. TNT melts at 80鳦 and can so be melted out very easily. But there are other more expensive explosives such as Hexal which are also used in large quantities. During the production of the ammunition the Hexal is pressed into the shells with high pressure. In this form the Hexal is no longer a powder, but a hard material. The essential problem is the safe removal of the Hexal. A new industrial scale technology is presented. It uses a high pressur water jet method to remove the Hexal from 35mm air defense ammunition. The recycled Hexal can be reused as an effective component in civil explosives.