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Lethality Modelling
A primary aim of any military conflict is to reduce the military capability of the opposing side. To this end much military equipment has to be designed on the one hand to render other military equipment ineffective, and on the other to reduce the threat posed by the opposing force, known as the lethality and vulnerability respectively. In all stages of the life cycle of such equipment from concept design, through detail design to operation there is a need to quantify lethality and vulnerability in order to assist design and operational choices. Examples of design choices are selection of warhead size for a guided weapon and the degree of control system redundancy in an aircraft. Examples of operational choices are fuze time selection in a guided weapon and weapon delivery range for an aircraft. Full scale trials are often out of the question and even small scale trials are expensive so lethality and vulnerability quantification is usually achieved through modelling on a variety of scales. These models allow large numbers of parameters to be studied in design trade-offs.
Current studies cover the development of lethality models for the engagement of air targets by blast fragmenting weapons, for use in both weapon concept development and aircraft survivability studies. These studies are supported by fragment penetration trials, undertaken by the Materials Department Experimental Impact Facility, and engineering analysis of this data in terms of component physical damage and component functional response to damage.
Application Areas
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Vulnerability of aircraft to physical attack, a component of aircraft survivability.
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Development of guided and unguided weapon concepts
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Development of lethal mechanism, i.e. warhead and fuze concepts.
Analysis Tools
Tools available and in development include:
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Lethality models for anti-air weapons that simulate fusing, direct hit damage, system damage, structural damage and damage aggregation, while looping through a large number of engagement parameters.
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Empirical fragment penetration codes, component description packages and shotline simulation, and fragment debris cloud simulation.
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A database of experimental fragment damage data.
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Detailed vulnerability data for missiles.
