The Behavior within Minimum Signature Propellants during Impact IM Tests

The primary objective of this effort is to further develop and validate a computational capability which can be used to assess propulsion systems for compliance with insensitive munitions (IM) requirements. Comprehensive testing to ascertain IM compliance for such systems is time consuming and expensive, but necessitated by safety, transportation, and deployment concerns. Sub-scale testing requirements and screening tools have been developed in an attempt to reduce the time and expense of deploying these systems. However, despite the clear advantages these approaches offer, the effects of scaling and full system configuration influences are extraordinarily difficult to predict and account for in these sub-scale testing scenarios. Thus, it is not always possible to directly ascertain compliance with IM requirements based on the results of these tests. A theoretically-comprehensive computational tool, once calibrated using laboratory-scale testing and validated against material performance databases, has the potential to predict the performance during IM compliance testing using sub-scale behavior and screening test results. Building upon currently existing sub-scale testing, providing an analytical understanding of the results through a computational framework and extrapolating that assessment to predict full-scale behavior would drastically reduce testing requirements and overall cost while accelerating the qualification of the new propellants and systems.