Environmentally friendly recycling of hexal in medium caliber ammunition in industrial scale

The major task in the recycling of Hexal used in air defense ammunition is the secure, environmentally friendly and cost-saving removal of the Hexal f rom the case. For this purpose a production plant was constructed, by which the Hexal can be extracted in one minute from four 35 mm grenades by means of drilling and application of high pressure water. The water treatment tu rned out to be the key step of this process. Increasingly severe environmen tal regulations force the industry to clean and reuse the water in the proc ess. The diversity of the cleaning methods available is strongly limited by the explosive as material to be separated, by the broad particle size dist ribution, the high water throughput and the high purity request of the high -pressure pump. The implemented separation process consists of a sedimentat ion and a filter part. This offers the advantage that there are no moving p arts in the system and therefore the maintenance is relatively simple.