ULTRAMET — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N221-075

Description

Current antiship missiles such as the Harpoon and the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) use conventional high explosive fragmenting warheads to defeat a ship’s armor and destroy the target. Although the LRASM carries a much larger warhead than the Harpoon (1000 lbm versus 488 lbm), it is much more expensive. The goal of this project is to increase the effectiveness of antiship warheads in a cost-effective manner while also reducing the mass of the warhead. This will be achieved by means of a multilayered shaped charge liner that combines high-hardness materials (e.g. tungsten diboride), high-density materials (e.g. tungsten, rhenium), and high-ductility materials (e.g. tantalum) in an optimized configuration that takes advantage of the properties of each material. A high-density reactive material (e.g. tantalum + silicon carbide) can be added to the system to achieve enhanced behind-armor effects, thus further increasing the effectiveness of the weapon. In the proposed effort, modeling will be performed to optimize the shape and thickness of the individual layers, and both subscale and full-scale shaped charge liners will be designed. One or more subscale test articles will then be fabricated and tested to demonstrate their effectiveness. Work will then begin on a full-scale prototype, which will be tested in Phase II. To constrain costs, existing commercial manufacturing processes will be used to fabricate the multilayered liners.