Armament Materials
This chapter briefly reviews the properties of various materials required in the production of armaments. The ‘gun powder’ or ‘black powder’ is the earliest known explosive material used in gun barrels. Armaments are made up of those materials which are c
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Armament Materials
Abstract This chapter briefly reviews the properties of various materials required in the production of armaments. The ‘gun powder’ or ‘black powder’ is the earliest known explosive material used in gun barrels. Armaments are made up of those materials which are corrosion and chemical agent resistant. The metals with higher strength-to-weight ratio are advantageous for armament applications.
Keywords Armament material Material strength Stiffness High-temperature properties
Corrosion resistance
In order to qualify for the production of armaments, a metal must have following material properties: • • • • • •
High material strength Higher strength to weight ratio High-temperature properties of the material Stiffness or deformation characteristics Corrosion and chemical agent resistant Ease of fabrication.
The armament materials can be broadly classified on the basis of burning rate. First category includes those explosives in which decomposition of materials takes place though a flame front traveling at subsonic speeds (also known as Deflagration), are termed as ‘low-explosives’. The common example of this type is ‘Gun Powder’. It is the earliest known armament material used in China around 1000 AD. It is a mixture of fuel (sulfur or charcoal) and oxidizer (potassium nitrate), when ignited behind the bullets it generates enough pressure to eject them from the muzzle at high velocities. On the other hand, when the decomposition of explosive takes place through a ‘shock wave’ traversing the explosive material at supersonic speeds (termed as Detonation) suddenly releases abundant light, energy, and sound are known as ‘high explosives.’ Trinitrotoluene (TNT) comes under this category. The atomic bomb is another example of ‘high explosives’ which uses fissile
© The Author(s) 2017 M. Kaushik and P.R. Hanmaiahgari, Essentials of Aircraft Armaments, SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2377-4_5
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5 Armament Materials
material as isotopes of Uranium (U235 and U238), once detonated undergoes in a chain reaction producing enormous heat. For the production of missiles, the metals like magnesium, titanium, aluminum, and its alloys are extensively used. The usage of new metals in the missile technology has come into existence due to the fact that the missiles travel at supersonic speeds and encounter extreme temperatures during their flight. As a result, lighter metals such as molybdenum, beryllium, graphite compounds, and fiber-reinforced plastics like the carbon–carbon variety are being used in a large scale.
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