Software System for Advanced Warhead Computer Aided Engineering (CAE)/Computer Aided Design (CAD)

Advanced EFP warheads provide a number of modeling challenges that must be handled well to make designs feasible, but are very difficult to accomplish with current state of the art general purpose solver technology. A new modular, object orientedhydrocode system including graphical interfaces and optimizers has been developed using the Java programming language. Testing indicates that its performance is similar to existing packages, but the object oriented design of the coding permits it to beadapted and extended at rates that are more than an order of magnitude faster than traditional hydrocode systems. The Java based graphical interfaces are also easily adapted to provide exactly what is needed for a particular design problem, thus,providing enormous benefits to users in terms of faster learning and much less time spent on the warhead design process. Additional modules will be developed in this effort to provide support for advanced EFP designs.The past decade has seen a rapidincrease in the usage of non-linear finite elements and hydrocodes for many different kinds of design activities. Much of this increase in use has been the result of rapidly decreasing in computing costs. Over the past two years, however, the computingcosts have dropped to a level that is less than the cost of a specialized engineer to run these systems. Thus, the emphasis in mechanical simulation technology must necessarily be shifted from the traditional one of high performance computing orientedproducts to one of more user friendly and intelligent systems.A separate problem is that non-linear finite element software simply cannot address all of the problems presented by engineering. Thus, today's software is both too complex and frequentlyinadequate for a given systems' unique needs. Another complication is that the time necessary to train an engineer to properly use the general purpose software systems if frequently greater than the average time he is likely to stay at a company.Thesoftware system developed under this contract is being done using the Java programming language which represents a major change from the traditional usage of Fortran. A modern object oriented programming structure for the system is used which allowsnumerical methods that are ideally suited to mechanical design problems to be implemented along with appropriate graphical user interfaces. Testing has shown that newer releases of Java are only slightly slower than Fortran for scientific programming.Most specific problem classes, however, have properties that can be exploited to make the Java based simulations even faster than the general purpose Fortran systems. With an object oriented modeling system, it is possible to produce better and fastersimulations and designs at lower overall cost, including the customization of the software system.A final benefit of the system is that the Java language provides immediate access to standardized interfaces for a variety of technologies which are taken forgranted in consumer software, but largely absent from mechanical engineering software. The most important of these are internet technologies, database interfaces and multimedia. A proper exploitation of these capabilities will provide productivityimprovements to engineers for a long time to come.