Mechanical Engineering
Tagline
Where There's a Prill There's a Way
Year
2026
Sponsor
LLNL

Our mission at Sphero-Ex is to make energetic-material manufacturing safer, automated, and continuous. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory currently uses extrusion-spheronization to convert slurry-like energetic material into pellets for efficient capsule storage, but the process requires operators to manually transition material between extrusion, spheronization, and collection. This creates repeated exposure to hazardous energetic material and conflicts with the explosives manufacturing safety principle of the “3 M’s”: minimum people, minimum time, and minimum exposure. While extrusion-spheronization is established in other industries, it has not been fully optimized for energetic-material manufacturing, where containment and exposure reduction are critical design requirements. LLNL sponsored us to develop a fully autonomous extrusion-spheronization system that reduces operator interaction throughout the workflow. Our system extrudes slurry material, gravity-feeds the extrudate into a custom spheronizer, uses a cam-actuated mechanism to drop the friction plate after spheronization, and directs the finished pellets with compressed air into a collection chamber for end-of-day retrieval. Through wet-run testing and Morphologi Image Analyzer microscopy, we confirmed that our pellets achieve size, consistency, and sphericity comparable to more expensive, manual industrial systems.

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Mechanical Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Mechanical Engineering