Leveraging a Commercially-Available Z-axis Milled Carbon Fiber Composite to Reduce the Weight of Large-Caliber Gun Tubes

One of the ways that the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center (CCDC-AC) is working to enable the next generation of expeditionary combat vehicles is by using composite wrapped gun tubes to reduce the weight of large caliber weapons systems. Currently available composite tapes used to make composite wrapped gun tubes have limited through-thickness performance. This leads to excessive dilation and creates issues with pre-mature failure of the gun tube and unwanted reduction in projectile velocity. Boston Materials’ proposed solution is a composite tape (tradename: Supercomp™) that enhances through-thickness performance to eliminate dilation and integrates into existing manufacturing methods, enabling production-ready composite wrapped gun tubes for the CCDC-AC.