Alternative Manufacturing Methods and Materials for Gun-Launched Components

The US Army seeks solutions to enhance mission capabilities through mass reduction in munition components. This goal is inhibited in large part due to the geometric constraints inherent with existing component fabrication via traditional manufacturing methods. Alternative manufacturing methods, such as additive manufacturing, relaxes these constraints to allow for novel and complex geometric solutions to be physically realized. Corvid proposes to develop a toolkit for designing lightweight components that maintain structural requirements and will be produced with additive manufacturing. This toolkit will design new munition components based on the expected structural loads using current additive manufacturing constraints. To support the range of potential components, two optimization methods will be initially implemented: topology and structural infill. Topology optimization uses numerical methods to relocate material within the design space to best meet the design goals. Structural infill optimization relies on a fixed topology or cell geometry to populate the interior volume of a component while maximizing its sparsity. Corvid will demonstrate the design toolkit by applying these optimization techniques to design a lightweight component on a current round through the generation of an array of competing solutions and metric-informed selection.