Munitions Lifecycle Technologies
Abstract
This focus area supports improving the Department’s ability to understand, measure, predict, and mitigate safety and reliability problems caused by materials aging and degradation in weapons systems. This area also focuses on developing technologies for the safe and environmentally friendly demilitarization, recycling, and reuse of munitions. Current stockpile assessment methods typically focus on addressing materials aging and reliability problems after they occur, rather than anticipating and avoiding future problems or failure mechanisms. The overall objective of this work is to develop a toolset of computational models that are able to quantitatively predict materials aging processes and ultimately improve the long-term reliability of weapons systems, sub-assemblies, and/or components. This objective is achieved by: identifying aging mechanisms, quantifying the rates at which those aging mechanisms occur, developing predictive models, and using these models to predict the munitions stockpile reliability. An additional objective of this work is to develop technologies and methodologies to enable munitions health management and condition-based maintenance. The specific projects in the warhead and penetration technology focus area are: – Predictive materials aging including: solder interconnect reliability, corrosion of electronics, and adhesive degradation – MEMS reliability – Military use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics – Complex system health assessment
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2012
- Source ID
- 42ebe8c0d97521e326ab5548dad329c4