Scalable Process for Drying of Obscurants

Drying of obscurant materials by traditional methods results in agglomeration because individual obscurant flakes are drawn together by capillary forces and then retained by van der Waals forces. Freeze drying and supercritical drying are better than traditional methods but are generally cost-prohibitive for drying of low-value and mass-produced materials. Lynntech proposes to develop a process based on spray drying followed by immediate surface functionalization to obtain dry and well-dispersed obscurant material. This approach eliminates the capillary forces present in evaporative drying that causes tight aggregation between the neighboring obscurant flakes.       During Phase I, Lynntech in collaboration with Texas A&M University, has demonstrated the technical and economic feasibility of its approach. The obscurant materials were extensively characterized to determine their physical and chemical properties. Their evaluation as obscurants indicate significant improvement over baseline material performance with a fractional increase in cost.       We propose to perform process-scale-up and integration in Phase II to enable generation of large batches of obscurant materials by operation of a continuous process. This approach will generate high-performance obscurant materials at scale suitable for testing in explosive munition. Additionally, improved shelf-life and reduced agglomeration of Lynntech’s materials will be demonstrating by testing in Phase II.