Synthetik awarded multi-year contract from the U.S. Army to develop a new interior ballistics solver.
Synthetik Applied Technologies LLC has been awarded a multi-year contract from the U.S. Army’s CCDC Armaments Center to develop iBallistix - a new state-of-the-art multiphase, multidimensional interior ballistics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver.
This high-fidelity physics-based tool allows the Army’s interior ballisticians to more effectively develop charge designs and ignition systems that perform efficiently and reliably. This in turn provides greater confidence in the safety concerns associated with gun launch testing (e.g., potential breech blowouts) and reduces the number of costly iterations required for system prove-out. Furthermore, the solver allows rapid development, simulation, and prototyping of new chemical compositions and geometric shapes for propellant grains to support weapon development.
iBallistix includes run-time selectable models for grain shapes, ignition models, burn rates, and thermo-chemistry (e.g., homogeneous, or deterred grains). The mass transfer that occurs when the propellants burn is handled in a general manner so that the propellant shapes, ignition models, and burn rates are all independent, and thus avoiding issues associated with non-physical dependencies that are prevalent in current simplified solvers.
The iBallistix solver library can be used to test burn rates and shape models in 0-D ‘closed vessel’ simulations, as well as general 1, 2, and 3-D cases for projectile motion and general environmental configurations (e.g., open area deflagration). Projectile motion is solved using a simple solid body motion solver for both the projectile and the weapon system (if recoil is required). Tabulated models derived from experimental data are included for generic propellant shapes and burn rates (either temperature- or pressure-based).
The user interface is supported by a pre-processing utility that automatically generates the necessary simulation files for a given set of input variables and parameters, including propellent model type and non-standard model coefficients.
The key capabilities of the iBallistix software include:
Simplified case setup
Support for 0, 1, 2, and 3-D cases, all with MPI compatibility
A wide range of run-time selectable propellant models
Access to a range pre- and post-processing utilities
Visualization using ParaView
Security sensitive models and data can be kept in separate secure libraries, and added at run-time
Upcoming developments and updates include:
Overset meshes and Fluid structure interaction (FSI) for filler elements
Liquid propellants
Various ignition stimuli
Methods for fitting coefficients to data (i.e., optimization)
iBallistix development is currently being funded under contract with the U.S. Army and is not publicly available.