Pressure relief of underground ammunition storage under missile accidental ignition

Abstract Safety of underground ammunition storage is an important issue, especially during the accidental ignition of missiles. This work investigates the pressure and temperature distribution of the multi-layer underground ammunition storage with a pressure relief duct during the accidental ignition process of the missile. A large-scale experiment was carried out using a multi-layered restricted space with a pressure relief duct to simulate the underground ammunition store and a solid rocket motor to simulate the accidental ignition of the missile. The results show that when the motor gas mass flow increased by 5.6 times, the maximum pressure of the ammunition storage increased by 5.87 times. At a certain motor flow rate, when the pressure relief exhaust area at the end of the relief duct was reduced by 1/2, the maximum pressure on the first layer did not change. But the rate of pressure relief was reduced and the time delayed for the pressure of ammunition store to drop to zero. In this experiment, when the motor ignition position was located in to the third layer ammunition chamber, the maximum pressure was reduced by 32.9% and also reduced the rate of change of pressure. In addition, for the experimental conditions, the theoretical analysis of the pressure relief of the ammunition storage is given by a simplified model. Based on the findings, some suggestions to the safety protection design of ammunition store are proposed.