The ballistic range has long been employed in a variety of engineering fields such as high-velocity impact engineering, projectile aerodynamics and aeroballistics, since it can create an extremely high-pressure state in very short time. Since the operation of the ballistic range includes many complicated phenomena, each process should be understood in detail for the performance enhancement of the device. One of the main processes which have significant influence on the device performance is the compression process of the driver gas. Most of the studies available in this field hardly discuss this phenomenon in detail and thus lack a proper understanding of its effect on the whole system performance. In the present study, a computational analysis has been made to investigate the fluid dynamic aspects of the compression process in the pump tube of a ballistic range and to assess how it affects the performance of the ballistic range. The results obtained are validated with the available experimental data. In order to evaluate the system performance, several performance parameters are defined. Effect of a shock tube added in between the pump tube and launch tube on the performance of the ballistic range is also studied analytically. Performance of the ballistic range could be significantly improved by the proper selection of the pump tube and high-pressure tube parameters and the addition of the shock tube.
We present the apparent optical performance variation of an infrared sensor caused by laminar flow field surrounding a highly supersonic projectile with cone shape head. An optical ray tracing model was constructed and numerical simulations of the aero-optical effects were performed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and isodensity surface based ray tracing computation. To maximize modeling and computation efficiency, the number of sampling isodensity layers was reduced to less than 5 for improved discretization of the inhomogeneous gradient index (GRIN) media. Using this method, the simulation results show that the BSE is smaller than about 2.8 arcsec when the projectile flies at 25, 35, 50 km in altitude, Mach 4, 6 in speed, and 0°, 10° in angle of attack. The technical details and implications of the optical ray tracing model are presented together with the simulation results.
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