Novel Penetrator Cases for Explosive and Fuze Survivability

ABSTRACT:Corvid Technologies and 3D Systems will collaborate to develop novel penetrator structures for enhancement of explosive and fuze survivability. These structures will provide lethality and penetration capability equal to or better than conventional penetrator designs. Our approach will optimize structural components and combine them in practical ways to meet penetrator functional goals. Topology optimization will maximize component mass specific strength, and strain energy rates at collapse being minimize. Optimization will be done at both the meso- and macro-scales. Mesoscale structures will be based lined against pyramidal lattices. The resulting metamaterials will be homogenized for implementation into computational structural dynamics simulations. These simulations will be used to optimize the macro-scale component topology by maximizing of charge-to-structure mass ratio and overall strength. 3D Systems will use additive manufacturing to create subscale prototypes of up to three penetrator designs. These prototypes will capture both the meso-scale structures and full-scale design details. Corvid will evaluate the prototypes performance using their compressed air gun to fire the prototypes into optically clear targets with oblique features and capture response with highspeed video. Phase I will result in an understanding of how topology optimization can improve penetrator structural performance. Phase II will mature these design concepts.BENEFIT:Commercialization will include expanded engineering services utilizing the approaches developed under this SBIR, and potential licensing of the modeling and visualization tools to interested third parties. These include military and civilian organizations dedicated to the development of materials and processes which improve performance metrics or fulfill the requirements of novel applications. In particular, the emergence of additive manufacturing of materials and components with adaptive properties using metal and polymers is one application where the ability to accurately predict mesostructural performance and effective behavior at a system-level would be imminently relevant.