Lethality Enhancement and Reactive Discrimination

There is a need to enhance discrimination of threat vehicles from penetration aids as well as the lethality of U.S. interceptors against ballistic, maneuvering, and cruise missiles especially those carrying chem/bio payloads. The lethal radius of systems such as THAAD and others can be increased by the insertion of highly energetic composites as reactive materials of various densities. Proper use of these materials in other scenarios will enhance discrimination capabilities of RVs vs. decoys. The proposed program describes several formulation approaches for property improvement and scale-up of compositions, which have already demonstrated superior performance in SBIR Phase I efforts in small-scale experiments. Several synthesis concepts are proposed for manufacturing and property evaluation in order to establish physical and reactive properties for consideration and insertion into the THAAD system as lethality enhancement options. In this Phase II program scale-up and ballistic evaluation is proposed for high velocity studies (5-10) km/sec including a miniature interceptor against a simulated missile target accompanied by analysis and predictions of enhancement for real world intercepts.