RAMCOM-2 - RAM Mixer Contactless Monitoring

猎鹰项目位于韦斯科特创业园，位于艾尔斯伯里附近的旧火箭研究机构，是目前英国仅有的三家生产固体燃料火箭和火箭推进剂的公司之一。以前我们用常规的高剪切混合来组合推进剂成分，如铝粉、高氯酸铵、各种粘结剂和HTPB橡胶；然而，Falcon在新应用中采用了共振声学混合（RAM），因为它有许多优点。虽然RAM提供了许多好处，但我们的问题是混合作用（发生在一个封闭的容器中，夹在一个容器和桌子的共振频率上振动）并没有完全理解。为了保持一致性，推进剂成分均匀分散是至关重要的，而这是如何发生的，特别是在成分可以有不同的大小和密度的情况下，更不用说其他添加剂对HTPB橡胶基塑化的影响了。我们的目标是与国家物理实验室一起开发一种技术，使我们能够跟踪动态混合过程，同时它正在进行质量控制和新配方的优化。

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.