The manufacturing of advanced explosives containing large amounts of a metal powders to improve performance, such as PAX-3, have proven difficult to transition to production. Manufacturing processes used to date have had low yield with a resulting high per unit cost and questionable product uniformity. Over the past year the Twin Screw Extruder (TSE) Team has been investigating the use of a TSE machine to mix and extrude an aluminum base explosive, (PAX-3) and have demonstrated the concept on a live formulation process using a smaller concentration of green solvents in comparison to the conventional batch processing with concomitant improvements in the degree of dispersion. The method uses a base material consisting of coated RDX (PAX-2 or PAX-2A) and reprocesses it into its aluminized corollary. This process can be easily extended to the manufacture of other explosive formulations. Furthermore, the process is extremely flexible allowing the reformulation of a base formulation into a number of different explosives with tailored characteristics.

By using this new technology the cost of manufacturing these explosives would be reduced by $60 to $120 per pound depending upon how successful current batch process improvements are. The organic solvents lost to the environment and waste water treatment requirements will also be greatly reduced.