[Development of a ballistic furnace for shell production]. Annual report 1998

During the fourth contract year, the authors continued to develop Ballistic technology of shell formation. A new upgraded version of Ballistic Furnace with longer hot zone (1.56m) and cooling one (1.2m) had been finally assembled, and a lot of shell formation experiments had been carried out. The change of the Ballistic Furnace configuration has led to significant changing in operational conditions suitable for shells production. They had found optimal operational conditions for some grades of initial granules giving them high yield of good shells. Serious attention was paid on initial granules preparation. In the experiments some unexpected results were obtained--first of all it was a strong influence of temperature profile, an initial granule velocity and a trajectory angle on good quality shells yield. Those observations made them consider some additional physical phenomena (initial granule defragmentation and gas convection inside hot zone) to explain good shell formation. Appropriate estimations of the velocity of possible convectional gas currents in the hot zone, strength of formed shells, thermal stress in an initial granule caused by its fast heating in the ballistic furnace etc. were made. Good quality shells up to 2mm in diameters with high yield were produced. Although a production of goodmore » quality shells in diameter range > 1.8 mm stays an easy job, their experience led them to declare that Ballistic technology hasn't reach its boundaries, and future development will allow them to obtain perfect results.« less