Tunable High Density Reactive Materials for Enhanced Counter Offensive Lethality

MATSYS proposes to develop high density, high energy density and high strength reactive materials to enhance the performance of reactive shaped charge liners and breaching charges. The proposed material system will use a blend of several elemental or compound powders capable of participating in an energetic (exothermic) chemical reaction. Further, the reactant powders will be selected such that at least one component will be mechanically"soft"to facilitate full densification of the blend into a structurally useful form. The consolidation will occur below the reaction initiation temperature to prevent any energy release during compaction and preserve the stored chemical energy of the exothermic reaction between the reactant powders for release upon target impact. The existence of different powder materials will allow for tailoring of the mechanical and reactive properties of the material through engineered variations of the volume fraction of each reactant, and by adjusting their particle size. This effort will combine our unique expertise in instrumented-Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) with high energy milling/mechanical alloying (MA) of reactive powder blends to develop tunable highly reactive structural materials with predictable ignition events. We intend to use MA on reactive powder blends to achieve initially a homogeneous microstructure and then nanostructured composites.