Performance Assessment of Penetrator Weapons

"There is a growing interest by our adversaries to utilize underground facilities for production and storage of "weapons-of-mass destruction" (WMD) and military hardware. Mechanized or conventional excavation techniques are used for construction of thesefacilities depending on the local conditions and their intended use. The penetrator weapons are designed to take out these underground structures. However, to protect against penetrator attack, these facilities are build at greater depth in hard rock.Prediction of performance of the penetrator weapons is contingent on thorough understanding of weapon-rock mass, including joint, fractures and other geologic features, interaction. Success of a planned mission depends on our ability to predict theperformance of the penetrator weapons by accounting for the site-specific characteristics of the geologic (host medium) and engineered (tunnel, cavity, etc) systems. The objective of this proposal is to develop and validate two generalized empiricalequations for penetrator weapons performance assessment and prediction of degree of damage to the engineered system. Both equations accept the characteristics of the penetrator weapons and site-specific characteristics of the geologic and engineeredsystems as input parameters. A series of physical modeling experiments at 1-g on scaled modeled tunnels are proposed for validation of the formulated penetrator "response" and "degree-of-damage" equations."