RMS-eVAL: Incorporating Reactive Materials Structures (RMS) for Self-Ignition and other Advanced Warhead Effects

Enig Associates, Inc. (“ENIG”) is developing, as part of the DARPA SBIR Phase II effort “Dynamic Multi-Scale Characterization Methods for Reactive Material Structures (RMS) for Advanced Warhead Effects (“RMS-eVAL”),” a software toolkit to accurately assess the design space of munitions containing RMS components by comparing their penetration, detonation and combustion effects to conventional weapon systems. Our ALE3D-based toolkit is setup to evaluate the chemical evolution of reacting RMS from ignition to combustion. Our multi-scale hydrocode-modeling approach includes sets of material models that incorporate both mechanical and longer time-scale chemical effects on targets, which is used to evaluate intermetallic interactions. Our toolkit focuses on the identification of dominant chemical reactions and evaluates how the chemical kinetics is affected by strain rates and microstructure morphology changes. The Phase II effort focuses on the three main objectives, (i) the validation of physics based models detailing the ignition of RMS, (ii) the evaluation of the design space opened up with the use of RMS in current and next generation systems, and (iii) the development of fast-running computational tools to enable the weapon system architects to leverage this design space. Validation of these tools will be conducted with the assistance of ARL-WMRD.