International Journal of Energetic Materials and Chemical Propulsion

THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN ETC-CONCEPTS

RÉSUMÉ

The paper deals with the prediction of the performance of modern types of ETC-guns. Such concepts are supposed to be an option for guns with increased performance compared to fielded systems. The advantage besides the performance consists of fast and reliable ignition as well as of the compensation of the temperature sensitivity. Modern concepts are based on high loading density (≥ 1.2 g/cm³) but only on minimum electric energy that appears to be sufficient for both ignition and control of the main combustion processes.
Conventional interior ballistics codes such as lumped parameter models or fluid dynamics based models successfully applied to many charge configurations are used to analyze the main propulsion features of such ETC-concepts. The interesting part is that the computational results of the codes compare fairly well for systems in the whole range of loading densities as long as the spatial pressure gradient shows a conventional shape. However there exist ETC-concepts under current investigation with non-conventional pressure gradient. For these cases the computational results differ significantly. The differences can be explained. The consequences with respect to the performance aire amazing. Another essential issue is coupled to the sensitivity of systems with high loading density. The computational results show how the sensitivity is affected by the charge design.