Us. ARMY TANK-AUTOMOTIVE AND ARMAMENTS COMMANDBuilding 95, Picatinny Arsenal, NJ 07805-5000 1. ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to focus on recent efforts to test and characterize the performance of MEMS inertial sensors and the characterization of battery-free embedded sensors in munitions. This paper will also discuss the need to implement and integrate internal wireless communications in conjunction with smart electronics and smart materials in innovative microelectronics designs with built in capability of duplex wireless communications between sensors and telemetry. Embedded wireless telemetry will eliminate wires and the stress on long wire runs between MEMS sensors and processing microelectronics in harsh environments.Further advancements in this wireless area will facilitate the integration of smart sensing, control and actuation with unprecedented capability to permanently embed telemetry as a part of the standard munition components. The embedded wireless telemetry would have built in capability for smart munitions stockpile surveillance, in-flight duplex communication and the capability to communicate to a ground station. Future telemetry links for munitions will have a significant multi-use capability, designed to measure, maintain reliability, predictive surveillance, actuation and remote control functionality.
The work reported in this paper is focused on an effective and efficient solution, namely Smart Isolation Mount for Army Guns (SIMAG), to the weapon stabilization and fire control issues facing U.S. Army guns. SIMAG is composed of the optimum integration of two innovative technologies, Vibration Control by Confinement and smart sensor/actuator/active control systems. The combined approach may a1o be applied to a gun barrel to reduce its undesired vibratory motions excited by external and internal disturbances, such as gun firing action. SIMAG reconfigures the distribution and propagation of excess vibration energy and confines vibrations to certain non-critical regions or modes within a structure. Concentrated passive, active, or smart damping elements or cancellation techniques may be applied to more effectively dissipate or cancel the trapped vibrations and to prevent an energy build up in the assembly. As the active elements, an array of collocated, PZT-based sensor-actuator sets is recommended for incorporation in SIMAG. Part of the active elements is used for spatially managing excess vibration energy while the other part is utilized for energy dissipation and cancellation. The preliminary results of our feasibility work on the SIMAG concept is demonstrated via computer simulations. It is shown that the insertion of a preliminary version of SIMAG in a 30mm gun system onboard an attack helicopter reduces the fluctuating loads and deformations measured across the helicopter bottom shell by 40 to 50%. SIMAG makes significant progress towards solving the firing control problems with affordable weight and power penalties by compensating for all errors in one of the two places, the turret-aircraft interface or gun barrel. Even though the initial target application of SIMAG is airborne guns, a modified version can be incorporated into ground armors, such as tanks and humvees.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.