Insensitive Munitions Technology

It is proposed to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate the `Bonfire' insensitive munition (IM) characteristics of solid rocket motors. The study will focus upon developing fundamental understanding of the transient heat transfer, heat flux and the overall thermal load to and through the motor case's various multi-layered materials at elevated temperatures up to solid propellant bondline ignition. The computational thermal model will incorporate the process of lateral and longitudinal heat transfer and temporal temperature distribution through the motor case as a consequence of both slow and fast cook-off. The modeling and simulation efforts will focus on a broad spectrum of case materials ranging from metals (e.g., steel, aluminum, titanium alloy, etc.) to composites (glass, Kevlar, graphite epoxy, carbon fibers, etc.). However, preliminary analysis has shown that careful case design and selection of composite materials have a good chance of greatly mitigating major IM scenarios. Consequently, modeling efforts will primarily focus upon composite motor cases and scalability from tactical to larger high-performance motors, for technical completeness the model development will also be applied to a broad spectrum of metal case materials.