lethality Test Instrumentation

Live fire testing against realistic targets is essential to progress in munition design. Traditional lethality testing is labor intensive and expensive. Its evaluation is highly subjective, susceptible to the biases and expertise of the evaluators, and prone to errors of omission. A comprehensive suite of calibrated instruments is needed to allow the lethality test engineer to fully exploit these expensive tests. This program designs instrumentation suites with broad application to lethality testing. Phase I assesses novel and conventional measures of weapon damage. It matches the measurements with damage modes, and assesses the information content of the signal. Promising approaches are matched with classes of weapon/target pairs. These are the basis for concepts recommended for further exploration and development. Phase II prototypes the lethality instrumentation systems. Sensor suites are assembled, and preliminary integrating software is implemented. These systems are refined and validated in live fire tests performed by the Government. Lethality test support systems to be developed under Phase III are selected for their demonstrated utility. The proposed program will identify accessible battle damage assessment signals as a natural product of well instrumented lethality tests. Judicious fusion of selected signals should improve damage evaluation reliability.