Design and Analysis of Kinetic Energy Projectiles Using Finite ElementOptimization

摘要

This report discusses the minimization of the parasitic mass of a 120-mm cannonlaunched kinetic energy projectile. The purpose of this study was to design a minimum mass aluminum sabot to launch both depleted uranium and tungsten heavy alloy penetrator materials for the M829 penetrator geometry. The minimization was conducted by implementing finite element techniques. A parametric model of a kinetic energy projectile using a double ramp traction sabot was constructed and an input stream for the ANSYS engineering analysis software was created. This input stream created the mesh for the projectile, solved for the stresses for each penetrator material, and implemented the optimization capabilities within ANSYS to minimize the mass of the sabot. Twenty-five iterations were required to reach a local minimum of the objective function (sabot mass) and resulted in a 15% decrease in sabot mass. The entire process (initial design and evaluation, optimization, and final analysis) was completed in one day (9 hours wall clock and 2 man-hours) on a personnel workstation.