Development of a Method to Produce High Energy Blasting Prills

摘要

A method has been developed for the production of high energy blasting prills (HEBP) containing TNT/Al or TNT/RDX/Al; the average particle size of the prills is approximately 3 mm. Such HEBP explosives seem attractive for special military engineering applications because they are free-flowing, water resistant, have a long shelf life and can be used over a wide temperature range. The method consists of forming fluid droplets of a molten mixture of explosive at the tip of a small-diameter nozzle immersed in the top of a water column. After the droplets leave the nozzle, they solidify as they fall through the remainder of the column. To avoid building up static charges, the prills are made semi-conductive by coating them with a thin layer of graphite. Studies were first undertaken in the laboratory and then scaled up to a 44-cm diameter pilot-plant prilling column that can produce about 90 kg of prills per batch. Some 1000 kg of each of two different compositions were produced for determination of their cratering characteristics (in a separate study). (Author)