Designers of advanced gun systems have been tasked with increasing barrel life in the face of the extreme erosion and wear of the interior ballistics environment. The addition of refractory metal coatings, such as chromium or tantalum, have greatly boosted service life, but even with these applications the erosion resistance of the underlying gun steel is the service-life limiting factor. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is currently undertaking an effort to determine the feasibility of ceramic gun barrels. Ceramics are attractive for liner materials because of their high-temperature performance and erosion-resistance characteristics. Unfortunately, their drawbacks are low tensile strength, low fracture toughness, and brittle fracture. Previous research into the replacement of metals with a ceramic liner has met with limited success, at best, but advances in ceramic manufacturing technology, probabilistic design, and sheathing technology have led to renewed interest in this area. The work at ARL has focused on developing a material property database of commercially available ceramics, extensive finite element and analytic modeling, experimental verification, and, ultimately, demonstration of the ceramic gun barrel technology. This body of work will focus on the derivation of analytic models for an N-layered tube to calculate the Weibull failure probabilities for a ceramic liner. Model results are verified through high-pressure burst testing of blank and sheathed ceramic tubes. The application of the models as a design tool is explored by generating failure surface plots to investigate optimal geometries and prestress levels for a variety of different liner and sheath materials across various caliber systems.
Skip Nav Destination
e-mail: rcarter@arl.army.mil
Article navigation
Research Papers
Probabilistic Modeling for Ceramic Lined Gun Barrels
Robert H. Carter
e-mail: rcarter@arl.army.mil
Robert H. Carter
U.S. Army Research Laboratory
, AMSRD-ARL-WM-MB, Building 4600, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005
Search for other works by this author on:
Robert H. Carter
U.S. Army Research Laboratory
, AMSRD-ARL-WM-MB, Building 4600, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005e-mail: rcarter@arl.army.mil
J. Pressure Vessel Technol. May 2006, 128(2): 251-256 (6 pages)
Published Online: December 30, 2005
Article history
Received:
December 8, 2005
Revised:
December 30, 2005
Citation
Carter, R. H. (December 30, 2005). "Probabilistic Modeling for Ceramic Lined Gun Barrels." ASME. J. Pressure Vessel Technol. May 2006; 128(2): 251–256. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.2172966
Download citation file:
Get Email Alerts
Cited By
Surface Strain Measurement for Non-Intrusive Internal Pressure Evaluation of a Cannon
J. Pressure Vessel Technol (December 2024)
Dynamic Response and Damage Analysis of a Large Steel Tank Impacted by an Explosive Fragment
J. Pressure Vessel Technol (February 2025)
Related Articles
Reliability of a Conceptual Ceramic Gas Turbine Component Subjected to Static and Transient Thermomechanical Loading
J. Eng. Gas Turbines Power (April,1998)
Long-Term Testing of Advanced Ceramics: Concerns, Insights, and Recommendations
J. Eng. Gas Turbines Power (October,1996)
A New Probabilistic Approach for Accurate Fatigue Data Analysis of Ceramic Materials
J. Eng. Gas Turbines Power (October,2000)
Statistical Comparisons Between Qualification Tests for Gun-Fired Projectiles
J. Appl. Mech (September,2010)
Related Proceedings Papers
Related Chapters
An Algorithm for the Quantification of Hybrid Causal Logic Models (PSAM-0339)
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment & Management (PSAM)
Constructing Dynamic Event Trees from Markov Models (PSAM-0369)
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment & Management (PSAM)
Solution of Phased-Mission Benchmark Problem Using the SimPRA Dynamic PRA Methdology (PSAM-0345)
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment & Management (PSAM)