(437c) Energetic Material Process Development Using Scale-Down Experiments

Chemical process development is a challenging and exciting task for the chemical engineering profession. Utilization of in-situ tools combined with offline analytics afford the proper degree of process understanding to safely scaleup energetic materials from gram scale to multi-kilogram scale. Energetic materials pose inherently different challenges when compared to production of fine chemicals or pharmaceuticals. Energetic materials are not forgiving and require the ultimate respect by the chemical engineer as the processes are transitioned from the laboratory to pilot scale. Case studies on scaling up energetic materials utilizing various chemical engineering principles will be presented.