Semi-Active Magnetorheological Recoil Dampers for the Apache Helicopter Chain Gun

Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. (SPA) proposes to develop a semi-active recoil damper system for the Apache AH-64 helicopter nose chain gun based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) magnetorheological (MR) fluid and digital control technologies. This retro-fittable recoil system will allow for substantial improvements in the accuracy of the 30mm chain gun during high rates of fire by dissipating recoil forces, which excite the flexural modes of the gun barrel and gun mount structure, thereby causing dispersion of rounds at the target. SPA will exploit a semi-active nonlinear controller, which will remove energy from the system, for suppression of gun recoil forces (primarily 10Hz). During the proposed Phase I effort, a full scale prototype system will be designed and built based on the prototype Rheonetics(tm) MR damper by Lord Corp., and integrated with an Apache 30mm gun test apparatus in collaboration with the U.S. Army Advanced Drives and Weapon Stabilization Lab (ADAWS), U.S. Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. BENEFITS: Real-time, on-line, recoil damping augmentation of fire systems will increase the lethality of air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons systems by reducing the number of rounds required for a specific target kill. Nondimensional scaling analysis tools will allow for accurate scaling of full-scale dampers based on model-scale data.