Novel Hard-Nosed Penetrators

There is currently an urgent need for the development of novel penetrator concepts capable of defeating hardened concrete reinforced targets. The use of a hard nose and high strength and high toughness steel can result in significant improvement in the penetrator performance. It follows, that the creation of a conceptual penetrator with a very high hardness nose structure, followed by a high strength and high toughness steel, will be ideal. The difficulty in fabricating this conceptual penetrator provides a tremendous challenge to the material science and engineering discipline. The key impediments to the development of such penetrators are the difficulty in the economic fabrication of the hard nose and its integration with the trailing steel structure. Phase I investigations have successfully demonstrated the ability of powder injection molding (PIM) technique to produce high hardness tungsten carbide nose structures, which has also been successfully integrated with a trailing steel section. Phase II program will build on this concept, optimize the properties, and develop a process for the economic fabrication of such hard nosed penetrators in large numbers. Success in this project will result in a new class of penetrator whose performance will be superior compared to state-of-the-art penetrators.