Modeling High-Temperature Erosive Gas Flow to Support Barrel Erosion Reduction Concept Modeling for Fire Support Gun Application

"New requirements for modern gun systems have greatly increased the propellant flame temperature and reactivity of the combustion products. As a result, thermochemical erosion can greatly reduced the service life of the gun tubes in these systems.Coatings and liners have been used to mitigate erosion, with mixed results. In order to design a new gun tube which resists excessive wear, a thorough understanding of the mechanisms contributing to thermochemical erosion is necessary. Although most ofthe tools required to calculate thermochemical erosion exist as individual programs, the actual analysis procedure is quite cumbersome, labor intensive and error prone. These individual physical models need to be extended to increase their applicabilityfor new gun systems and the results merged into a Unified Thermochemical Erosion Program. This new program development will result in a single computer code that melds modern computational modeling with all the prior knowledge of thermochemical erosion.The new code will allow designers to parametrically evaluate and compare erosion performance resulting from various combinations of propellant, materials, and wear-reduction technologies. This screening tool will allow the designer to concentrate on themost promising wear resistant technology, rather than waste time on a hit and miss approach. The benefits of the development of the Phase II product, the Unified Thermochemical Erosion computer