III International Conference

PP-III-93UTILIZATION OF LARGE-SCALE COMPOSITE SOLID ROCKET PROPELLANTCHARGES WITH APPLICATION OF CATALYTIC TECHNOLOGIESEryomin V.N., Pestereva N.V., Degtyar V.G., Shandakov V.A. 1 , Komarov V.F. 2 ,Ismagilov Z.R. 3 , Khairulin S.R. 3State Rocket Center “Makeyev Design Bureau”, Miass, Russia1 Federal Research and Production Center «Altai», Biysk, Russia2 Institute of the Problems of Chemical and Energy Technologies, Biysk, Russia3 Boreskov Institute of Catalysis SB RAS, Novosibirsk, RussiaE-mail: src@makeyev.ruA novel technology of utilization of composite solid propellant charges with recovery ofmain components was developed. The method provides full environment safety due toapplication of effective catalytic technologies for purification of toxic and harmful products.The objective of this work is to develop a new, efficient, and environmentally safetechnology for processing large-scale composite solid rocket propellant (SRP) charges (up to50 tons) in order to dispose of the strategic missiles discarded due to technical reasons in thecourse of production, storage and service, and also subject to dismantlement according to theSTART-2 treaty.The technology is based on chemical disruption of SRP polymer binder. Thetechnological stages (Fig. 1) include preliminary fragmentation of the charge by jet cuttingwith an organic solvent, treatment of the obtained SRP lumps by special disruptivecompositions, followed by separation of the propellant solid components and their recyclinginto commercial products: octogen, ammonium perchlorate and aluminum compounds. Theprocess of SRP charge fragmentation by high-pressure toluene jets was worked out andadjusted (Fig. 2). Kinetic studies of chemical destruction of propellants of 2 types wereconducted. The composition of the reaction products was studied by NMR, IR spectroscopy,UV-VIS spectroscopy, GC/MS, etc. Basing on these studies a general tentative mechanism ofthe process was proposed. The stages of charge fragmentation, SRP chemical destruction,separation of SRP components, regeneration of the disruptive mixtures, catalytic treatment ofoff-gases and catalytic combustion of organic waste residues were tested and opimized inbench-scale installations.643