Manufacturing Engineering Development and Weaponization of Bonded Components For Lethal Air-to-Air Warheads

For a variety of warhead concepts, both for air-to-air applications and ground-based, it is desirable to explore new material combinations that provide enhanced lethality and functionality. For example, it may be desirable to combine materials that have high density with those having pyrophoric or other properties. In such advanced air-based weapons systems such as PIOS (Programmable Integrated Ordinance Suite) and PLOCAAS (Powered Low Cost Autonomous Attack System) it is desirable to have a range of weapons effects in order to enhance directional ordinance control, endgame agility and swath agility. This current proposal builds upon a successful Phase I effort to consider advanced, quality assured joining methods that employ dissimilar materials combinations to achieve the desired weapons effects. The proposed Phase II effort will address manufacturing engineering development to ensure that a production-ready process can be delivered and also weaponization considerations in which explosive launch and ballistic testing will be conducted on a prototype sub-scale warhead design.