Innovative Lightweight Small-Arm Polymer Cased Ammunition

To ensure that America's soldiers maintain their overwhelming combat edge into 21st century, use of lightweight polymers as the cartridge case material can alleviate a significant portion of this weight burden for soldiers. The objectives of this proposal is to demonstrate Frontier's innovative design and material technologies to produce high performance, lightweight small arm polymer cased ammunition that will achieve Army's goal of reducing combat soldier's load by 30 percent and increase his mobility. Recognizing the major root causes of past failures, Frontier has developed an innovative polymer cartridge case design and two proprietary polymer materials expected to overcome many potential failure modes of existing polymer case development efforts, such as insufficient ballistic performance, cracks on case mouth, neck, body and/or base, bonding failure of the metal-plastic hybrid case, difficulty of extraction from the chamber, incompatibility with propellant. It has the potential to achieve ballistic performance, be compatible with current cartridge manufacturing and assembling process, and be capable of operating under open and close bolt operation environments, while weighing 30 percent less than current system. Moreover, the technology can be applicable to not only 5.56mm but can also be readily used for 7.62mm and .50 caliber cartridge cases.