From Bench to Shooting Range: Correlating Base Bleed Chemistry With the Ballistic Performance of Extended Range Munition

Abstract

Extended range munitions (ERM) are systems whose performance is subject to aerodynamic, internal ballistics and trajectory effects. There are models in the literature for each of these aspects; thus, a holistic approach that unifies them would—theoretically—be able to predict the performance of an ERM from bench tests. In this work, we propose such approach. From the integration of chemical composition data, bench tests, combustion simulations, aerodynamic simulations and trajectory dynamics simulations, the behavior of a Base Bleed (BB) unit could be satisfactorily estimated. The results obtained suggest that the composition of combustion products plays a key role in the performance of BB systems.