Design Study of a Small Scale Soft Recovery System

A soft recovery system (SRS) is a device that stops a high speed projectile without damaging the projectile. The SRS is necessary to verify the shock resistant requirements of microelectronics and electro-optic sensors in smart munitions, where the projectiles experience over 20,000 g acceleration inside the barrel. In this study, a computer code for the performance evaluation of a SRS based on ballistic compression decelerator concept has been developed. It consists of a time accurate compressible one-dimensional Euler code with use of deforming grid and a projectile motion analysis code. The Euler code employs Roe's approximate Riemann solver with a total variation diminishing (TVD) method. A fully implicit dual time stepping method is used to advance the solution in time. In addition, the geometric conservation law (GCL) is applied to predict the solutions accurately on the deforming mesh. The equation of motion for the projectile is solved with the four-stage Runge-Kutta time integration method. A small scale SRS to catch a 20 mm bullet fired at 500 m/s within 1,600 g-limit has been designed with the proposed method.