Low-Cost, Lightweight, High-Strength Structural Materials for Small and Medium Caliber Sabots

The use of kinetic energy projectiles relies on a sabot structure to trap and transfer the expanding propellant energy to the penetrator. While the sabot is critical to projectile acceleration, it negatively affects the lethality performance of the penetrator. Therefore, lighter sabots are needed to increase penetrator kinetic energy. While traditional composite methods developed for large caliber projectiles have been successful, these approaches have not been scalable for small and medium caliber projectiles. Corvid Technologies proposes to design a new sabot utilizing a light weight metallic support structure with a polymer overmold. This methodology differs from those previous by shifting the problem from material design to structural design. The sabot structure will be designed with topology optimization to yield an optimal lightweight metal structure. This structure will be fabricated using additive manufacturing which affords both rapid fabrication and the realization of optimal solutions unattainable through traditional manufacturing. A polymer overmold is applied to structurally reinforce the sabot and maintain the current designs near-net external geometry. In this way, the metal structure and polymer overmold are designed in tandem to achieve optimal structural, aerodynamic, and kinetic energy performance. Corvid will provide material testing to validate material properties and performance.