In-Bore Dynamic Instrumentation for Navy Gun Barrels

"The retirement of 16-inch guns from the fleet combined with greater standoff to mitigate the cruise missile threat has made it necessary to greatly increase the performance of 5-inch and future 155 mm guns to enable fire support to littoral andregions. The energetic propellant charges required to achieve the necessary performance increases are expected to significantly elevate barrel heating and erosion, thus mandatory advanced barrel and ammunition designs to counter these effects. To successfully develop advanced barrel and ammunition designs, new barrel instrumentation is needed to completely characterize the parameters that relate to heating and erosion while minimizing the number of machined installation ports. Thesensor suite will include bore surface temperature, in-wall temperature, pressure, and local gas temperature and velocity. In addition, the sensor suite will measure erosion per shot or group of shots. Data reduction software will yield heat transfercoefficient versus time and total integrated heat input per shot. The Phase I effort will experimentally develop and assess the feasibility of the surface temperature and erosion sensors, assess the feasibility of the gas temperature/velocity by a paperstudy, and begin integration with existing pressure and in-wall temperature sensors to form an integrated suite. The proposed barrel sensor suite is anticipated to greatly enhance design and development of adva