High-Performance Computing and Simulation for Advanced Armament Propulsion

Abstract : The U.S. Army is exploring a variety of armament propulsion options for indirect- and direct-fire weapons to be employed in the legacy force and for the Future Combat System (FCS). Development of propelling charges for these weapons requires state-of-the-art physics-based modeling codes. The gun propulsion-modeling environment has traditionally been one in which independently developed and upgraded computer codes were used to analyze different propulsion techniques. with no single maintainable code able to evaluate several candidate system. This situation rendered comparison of ballistic performance for various weapon options cumbersome and inconclusive. In direct response to this situation. the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has developed a "next-generation" computer scaleable. three-dimensional, multi-phase, computational fluid dynamics code for armament propulsion (interior ballistics) modeling.