Improvement of a clean fast cook-off test in The Netherlands

Improvement of a clean fast cook-off test in The Netherlands

Scholtes, J.H.G.
Makkus, J.C.
Bouma, A.
Tijhuis, B.

2015

One of the IM tests described in STANAG 4439 is the Fast Cook-off (FCO) test. The Liquid Fuel or External Fire, Munition Test Procedures is described in STANAG 4240: “The objective of the selected fuel fire test is the determination of the reaction and time to reaction of the munition(s) when subjected to a liquid fuel fire environment”. However, there is a lot of discussion about this typical test. The drawback of the fuel fire test is the pollution of the environment during burning, as a result of the soot and many other substances in the fuel. Therefor a group of international experts is evaluating the use of propane as an alternate fuel for the Fast Heating Test Procedure identified in STANAG 4240 during a series of Fuel Fire Expert meetings (FFE). In the Netherlands the number of polluting large fuel fire test per year is limited but also the performance of the Dutch small fuel fire test leads to pollution and gives an undesirable situation. This is the reason that, in cooperation with the Knowledge Center of Weapons & Munitions of the Dutch MoD, also TNO has developed and tested a clean FCO test setup, based on propane. In the last IMEMTS conference the set-up was described and the results of several tests series, including a calibrating test series in co-operations with the US laboratories NSWC and NAWC, was presented. Since then, the set-up has been improved with respect to safety and several tests series have been performed to increase the hearth of the fire and improve the temperature distribution over the hearth. Also the heating of none cylindrical items such as munition boxes has been improved. The gas flow of the set-up is now remote controlled for safety reasons during live munition testing. The number of burners has been increased, up to 24 burners can now be used. Four relative expensive piezo-burners are used for ignition while the other have replace by cheaper burners without piezo-igniters. Also, the set-up of the burners has been changed; two lines of burners per side have been made, one pointing on the bottom of the tested item and one somewhere around the middle. This increases the hearth of the fire and the improves temperature distribution around the item. Now up to 10 cm below and above the test item, the temperatures are well above the 800 °C. One of the main advantages of this set-up is that burning is so clean that the fire is totally transparent and all items can be filmed during testing. With the new set-up and with the small fuel fire test a series of tests with live munitions has been performed. The results of the pre-test with the mock-ups, the results and comparison of the two tests series with live munition as well as the lessons learned from these tests series will be presented in this paper.

Observation, Weapon & Protection Systems
EM - Energetic Materials
TS - Technical Sciences
Explosives

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c0d95dcf-9b19-47c9-ac6c-9f0be0483bfa

525996

Proceedings 2015 Insensitive Munitions & Energetic Materials Technology Symposium IMEMTS "IM&EM: Real Warfighter Advantage and Cost Effective Solutions Throughout the Lifecycle", Rome, Italy, 18-21 May 2015

conference paper