PENETRATING URANIUM REAL FRAGMENT EXPERIMENTS FOR CONTAINMENT TRIALS (PURFECT)

Abstract

In order to develop fragment mitigation solutions, fragment simulating projectile trials are often undertaken. In these, cylindrical rods are fired into targets using high velocity launchers. One key assumption of this methodology is that the projectile penetration is representative of the penetration from real explosively-formed fragments, which has not previously been investigated. Here we detail the first series of trials in which explosivelyformed fragments, which were soft-captured in previous trials, were launched from a gas gun at velocities of approximately 1-2 km.s-1 into AA6061-T6 targets. To the best of our knowledge, a first. Whilst gathered data displayed significant scatter, the results do provide confidence that fragment simulating projectile rods are accurate simulants of real fragments in impact assessments. A method of simulating the real fragment impacts was also developed, with simulations of the trials undertaken and the results of the simulations matched reasonably well to the measured penetration depths.