NUMERICAL MODELING OF WEAR IN INTERIOR BALLISTICS

Abstract

When a barreled weapon is fired, the barrel will experience wear, which influences its lifetime. Repeated loading will further change the barrel geometry, leading to different side effects, such as pressure and velocity drop. In the presented work, mechanical wear is considered, and a wear criterion is proposed to be applied in finite element modeling. It considers the contact pressure and relative tangential velocity between the Faces in contact. This entity can be plotted as a contour plot or a wear profile as a function of the location along the barrel. Another entity is the wear volume, a way to quantify the wear with a single value. These wear entities and other options have been implemented into the used commercial explicit finite element code. A generic barrel is modeled to show the approach, and it is seen how a second run can take the worn barrel geometry into account. The software used for the simulations is the IMPETUS Afea Solver.