Effects of Aging and Environmental Conditions on Ammunition/Explosives Storage Magazines - Paper 1

摘要

The Defense Ammunition Center (DAC)/U.S. Army Technical Center for Explosives Safety (USATCES) recognized the need to establish the 'structural health' status of aging ammunition/explosives storage magazines. A recent accidental explosive event in an earth covered magazine demonstrated that legacy assumptions for structural failure may be unknown and potentially adversely affect safety. Aging and the effects of environmental factors may have an effect in the structural performance of the storage magazines when subjected to explosions. DAC requested the assistance of the University of Oklahoma, USACE-ERDC (Vicksburg), and USACE Engineering and Support Center to determine the 'structural health' of aging magazines, evaluate remediation methods, and perform structural analyses to duplicate structural conditions found in situ magazines. The key goals of the effort (July 2008 thru May 2010) are to gain an accurate estimate of scope of the problem of deficient magazines, to collect and archive data on the structural health of existing magazines, to identify practical remediation methods for riskgraded magazine renovation efforts, and to create a long-term health monitoring program for continuation of this important effort. Environmental conditions that could adversely affect the structural health of the magazine were determined and several installations (CONUS and OCONUS) were visited to perform visual inspections and gather material samples that were laboratory tested. Modeling this effort after the proven DoD Bridge Inspection program, a magazine inspection checklist was developed. A web-accessible data archive was developed to support storage and retrieval of magazine inspection data. This presentation will provide general information about the effort, discuss the decision process to determine what DoD installations were visited, development of the site inspection checklists, type of material samples that were taken and the web-based data base that was developed.