Warhead and Penetration Technology
Abstract
This focus area supports the development of new warheads and penetrator weapons through advances in materials processing and characterization, instrumentation, and computational codes. Significant increases in warhead performance are directly attributed to our ability to understand and accurately model the physics and fine details of new warhead designs, and to advances in increasingly sophisticated material processing. The Department’s requirement to achieve more precise weapon effects with minimum collateral damage is supported by work on controlled fragmentation, non-fragmenting warhead cases, and multiphase blast explosives (MBX). More recently, increases in performance and reductions in vulnerability are being achieved through improved warhead integration into munitions using a systems-oriented approach. The goals for penetrator weapons are to investigate, develop, and transition advanced technologies for the design, development, and performance assessment of the next generation of high performance, precision strike weapons. This effort directly supports national initiatives to defeat hard and deeply buried targets, which are proliferating worldwide, and to deny/defeat weapons of mass destruction. The work addresses high-velocity penetration into granular materials (sand and soil), penetration into advanced high-strength and ultra-high-performance concretes, new penetrator materials and designs, and non-inertial onboard instrumentation. The specific projects in the warhead and penetration technology focus area for FY16 are: - Multiphase blast munitions (MBX) technology. - Dynamic behavior of concrete. (New start in FY16) - Integrated munitions modeling & experimentation. - Modeling of strategic structures subject to ballistic impact or blast. - Concrete perforation and penetration modeling and experiments. - Explosive/metal interactions. - Structure, mechanical & shock-loading response, and modeling of materials. - Controlled effects warhead materials.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2017
- Source ID
- e48d8130d466a71f00dfefb4ff989ca1