The mixing of materials during additive manufacturing is a major benefit which allows one to compositionally and spatially tailor material properties, for example to locally control the reactivity in fuel: oxidizer systems known as thermites. This work characterizes an active mixing printhead used in conjunction with a 3D printing process known as Direct Ink Writing. Besides compositional control, a major benefit of this approach is that it offers a safe method for working with these materials which can otherwise be hazardous once mixed. Custom fuel and oxidizer inks are fed at fixed volumetric rates into an active mixing head, and both the rotational speed of the mixing impeller as well as the fuel:oxidizer ratio are varied. Upon ignition, the propagation speed increases with the rotational speed of the mixer and plateaus above a critical value of approximately 750 RPM. The critical mixing speed is corroborated by computational fluid simulations and an analytical expression that considers the inks' complex fluid behavior. Additionally, varying the composition results in a wide range of propagation speeds with peak reactivity corresponding to a fuel-rich formulation ( = 1.5). A test article incorporating a fast and slow-burning region demonstrates how spatial composition can manipulate the reactivity. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as
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