Direct Energy Exchange Enhancement in Distributed Injection Light Gas Launchers

It is not widely acknowledged or appreciated that conventional, two-stage light-gas launchers do not efficiently apply their high breech pressures to the design intent: accelerating the projectile. Our objective in this project was to carry out the analysis, design, construction, and testing of a new class of launchers that will address this limitation. Our particular application is to expand the pressure range of the conventional, two-stage gas launcher to overlap and validate the pressure regimes previously attainable only with shock waves generated by nuclear explosions, lasers, or multistage conventional explosions. That is, these launchers would have the capability to conduct--in a laboratory setting--high-velocity-impact, equation-of-state (EOS) measurements at up to 2-TPa (20 Mbar) pressure levels in high-Z materials. Our design entailed a new class of distributed-injection, gas-dynamic launchers that are designed to use a boat-tail projectile to overcome the fundamental gas-expansion phenomena known as escape velocity (the Riemann limit). Our program included analytical, numerical, and experimental studies of the fast gas release flow technique that is central to the success of our approach. The analyses led us to believe that, in a typical configuration, the pressure will be effectively applied to the projectile in a time short relative to its few-microsecond more » traverse time; the experimental program we conducted during FY1999 supported these estimates. In addition, our program revealed dramatic increased efficiency in this process that was previously unknown to the launcher community. The most fundamental practical restrictions on the performance of any gas launcher are the ability of the launcher to (1) contain pressure in a reservoir, and (2) effectively apply that pressure to the base of a moving projectile. Our gas-release test-fixture experiments showed that our design was capable of applying nearly twice the pressure to the projectile that is initially contained in the reservoir. This results deserves emphasis: whereas conventional guns apply a few percent of the reservoir pressure to a fast moving projectile, our design is paradoxically capable of applying nearly double the contained pressure. We later confirmed this experimental result analytically and related it to a type of direct energy exchange between unsteady fluid flows. This physical approach was the basis for the German V-1 ''buzz bomb'' of World War II; it has been applied to a limited number of commercial applications. (This work should not be confused with the German WWII distributed injection missile launchers.) Direct fluid-energy exchange has not previously been applied to any gas-launcher technology. As a result of these discoveries, we estimate that a practical, 15 km/s, high-velocity launcher could be built using our direct-energy-exchange, distributed-injection approach. However, the radical nature of the results, the lack of confirming or allied work being carried out anywhere else, and the fact that it would take extensive time and resources to demonstrate targeted performance precluded further development. We plan to submit the results to a refereed journal to ensure that the work will not be lost to the launcher community. « less