RAMCOM-2 - RAM Mixer Contactless Monitoring

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The Falcon Project based on Westcott Venture Park, the old Rocket Research Establishment near Aylesbury is one of only three companies who currently manufacture solid fuel rockets and rocket propellants in the UK. Previously we used conventional high shear mixing to combine the propellant components such as aluminium powder, ammonium perchlorate, various binders and HTPB rubber; However, Falcon is adopting Resonant Acoustic Mixing (RAM) for new applications because it has many advantages.Whilst RAM offers many benefits, our problem is that the mixing action (which takes place in a closed vessel clamped to a table which vibrates at the resonant frequency of the vessel and table) is not fully understood. For consistency, it's critical that the propellant constituents are uniformly dispersed, and how that takes place is particularly where the components can have different sizes and densities let alone the effect of other additions to plasticise the HTPB rubber base is unclear. Our objective is to develop a technique together with NPL to enable us to follow the dynamic mixing process whilst it's in progress both for quality control and optimisation of new formulations.