STATISTICAL COMPARISON BETWEEN COMPONENT LEVEL AND SYSTEM LEVEL TESTING FOR THE EXCALIBUR PROJECTILE

摘要

A Ballistic Rail Gun is used as a time and cost efficient approach to perform testing on electrical and mechanical components and subsystems at the development and qualification levels, for the Army's new 155-mm precision guided projectile, Excalibur. Being able to test gun launch survivability at a component level, and the ability to recover and analyze the hardware afterwards, provides a significant benefit to the Army. Critical failures in the components can more easily be identified and corrected before being incorporated into the entire system. The Ballistic Rail Gun has also been used because it is cheaper and quicker than Live-Fire Gun Launch testing at Yuma Proving Grounds. The environments experienced in the Ballistic Rail Gun, however, do not directly correlate to those experienced from testing in the field. The process used by the Ballistic Rail Gun to softly recover the hardware after exiting the barrel subjects the items being tested to environments which are different than those in a conventional gun launch. Firing data recovered from Excalibur Soft-Recovery Vehicle tests conducted at Yuma Proving Grounds supports these findings. This paper discusses comparisons between the gun launch environments of the Ballistic Rail Gun and conventional firing platforms using data collected by On-Board Recorders from both systems. This paper examines the differences in the setback, balloting, and set-forward accelerations and considers both the advantages and disadvantages of using the Ballistic Rail Gun as a development and qualification testing tool for components being used in today's increasing development of precision guided munitions.