Development and analysis of a leak-based blast attenuator and scaling laws for primary blast peak overpressure for a large caliber muzzleloaded cannon

One of the primary aspects of the research and development work carried out at Benet Laboratories is the Soldier. Maintenance of their health in the field is the first priority while the second priority is the enhancement of their performance. Therefore, a new concept for a weapon system that targets these two priorities is highly desirable. This is the case with a new concept that can reduce the peak overpressure without the use of a muzzle device for a muzzle loaded cannon system. Such a novel concept was developed in this thesis through the application of propellant leak into the precursor region, i.e., when the projectile is still in the bore. A 3D hydrocode (ALE3D) was employed to predict the blast overpressure for the baseline and propellant leak configurations. However, a 3D hydrocode is computationally very expensive to predict peak overpressure in the far-field and an efficient method to predict peak overpressure in the far-field is of significance. Therefore, scaling laws for primary blast peak overpressure were also developed in this thesis.;Initially, two propellant leak concepts were examined. A bulge leak method and a channel leak method, which were compared to the baseline configuration. The initial channel leak configuration (referred to as CLM-1) significantly reduced the exit pressure ratio during projectile ejection, and thereby, resulted in a weaker blast. This in-turn substantially attenuated the peak overpressure to the rear of the muzzle without the aid of a muzzle device while having a marginal loss in the projectile exit velocity. For CLM-1, at one monitored location with the largest peak overpressure, a reduction of about 38% in peak overpressure was observed as compared to the baseline case. In order to compare different leak configurations, a performance metric was defined by comparing the ratio of peak overpressure and projectile exit velocity for a leak configuration to that for the baseline configuration. This metric was referred to as the Figure of Merit (FoM) and defined for any probe location. An average FoM was also defined based on the average of local FoM over different locations/probes. The greater the FoM is above zero, the better the configuration. The average FoM for the CLM-1 configuration was 0.221. In addition to FoM, shock structure and strength were also analyzed for the bulge and channel configurations at both the precursor and blast stages.;With the success of the CLM-1 configuration, we then performed a parametric study of the channel leak geometry and examined the effect of different geometric parameters on peak overpressure attenuation. The idea was to further improve the performance of the channel leak method. We divided our parametric study into five groups (i.e., A through E), referred to as CLM-A through CLM-E configurations. The focus in these five groups was on geometric parameters that were expected to be the most influential or relevant. Three relevant geometric parameters were considered in this work. In groups A and B, we focused on channel leak volume. Group C analyzed the effect of channel length while groups D and E investigated the effect of aspect ratio. The five groups were ordered in this way because we anticipated the total leak volume to be the most influential parameter, then the channel length which was followed by the aspect ratio. The total leak volume of 7.5% resulted in a relatively high average FoM. On the other hand, the use of channels with a shorter length was found to be detrimental while a lower value of aspect ratio was beneficial. Three leak configurations of CLM-A1, CLM-E1 and CLM-E2 provided excellent peak overpressure attenuation (i.e., above 45% and up to 63%). Each led to an average FoM above 0.5 while CLM-E configurations resulted in lower local FoM for probes near the muzzle and higher FoM for probes farther from the muzzle, and thus, a higher variation of FoM over the probes. The average FoM based on the far-field probes was about 0.575 and 0.560 for CLM-E1 and CLM-E2, respectively, and 0.520 for CLM-A1. Blast structure and strength were also analyzed for these three configurations.;In the last part of this thesis, we focused on the baseline and CLM-A1 configurations in order to develop scaling laws for the primary blast peak overpressure. Two different power-law scaling techniques were considered. In the first power-law, scaling parameters were defined from the muzzle center. The second power-law scaling was defined based on the blast center. The muzzle center based power-law has been used in the past while the blast center based power-law is a newly developed scaling law in this thesis. For the baseline configuration, both scaling laws performed well and for many locations absolute difference was below 10%. For the CLM-A1 configuration, blast center based power-law predictions were better than those from the muzzle center based power-law and showed a better overall correlation with the ALE3D predictions.