Critical Aspects in Propellant Mixer Development

Mixer is versatile equipment, finding application in diverse fields ranging from Household, Food, Pharmaceuticals, Chemical, Personal care industries, Construction, Rocket Propellant application and many others. To suit the requirement of individual applications, Mixers have been developed with different design philosophies-(a) horizontal and vertical versions with (b) single, dual, three and four blade configurations and (c) with and without planetary motion to the agitator system. Some mixers are of fixed bowl (Mix container) construction and some are rotating bowl type.... For Rocket propellant applications, considerations like stringent requirements of homogeneity and consistency of the product mix as well as the operational safety drive the choices in the Design Philosophy and various features. This paper attempts to focus on some of the salient features of the Solid propellant Mixers developed at CMTI.