Lightweight shipping container for solid rocket motor with Insensitive Munitions

It is desirable to manufacture shipping containers for large solid rocket motors (SRM) with insensitive munitions (IM) up to 50-in in diameter. Shipping or packaging containers of SRM should have good thermal insulation, lightweight, ballistic resistant, high temperature and corrosion resistant, and damage resistant properties in addition to several IM requirements. Missiles are usually transported in a container and are fired from a separate device. Currently used shipping containers for MDA’s SRMs do not have sufficient combined ballistic resistant capability and IM characteristics. Each container weighs several thousand pounds and some of them do not have flame resistant properties. This makes the SRM and missiles very vulnerable in their container during shipping. In the SBIR Phase I project we have successfully developed a lightweight hybrid composite sandwich structure that showed excellent IM properties. Phase II project will optimize and scale up the fabrication of the sandwich structure and a subscale prototype of shipping container. We will team up with Lockheed Martin Missile and Fire Control (LMMFC-D), Raytheon, and ATK to develop and evaluate the proposed shipping container for MDA’s applications. The proposed technology will be most beneficial to MDA’s systems including shipping containers for very large SRMs, Ground Based Interceptor (GBI) missile containers, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3), Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, SM-3, and missile cases.