Materials Sciences LLC SBIR Phase I Award, June 2019

With recent advances in additive manufacturing technology, there has been a renewed interested in the application and development of topology optimization to exploit the benefits of these advances to developed improved perforators. The pay-off of an optimized perforator would be less mass necessary for case structure (i.e., survivability) and more mass devoted to high explosive (i.e., blast and lethality). TO-designed munitions would be more efficient, enabling the replacement of larger munitions with smaller munitions. The current approach to topology optimization (TO) is to collapse the time history of an aperiodic, dynamic event into a single description of body forces – i.e., a simplified static representation of a dynamic event. This approach does not incorporate the structure’s force-time history into the topology optimization process. Consequently, the current approach may be suboptimal and, in some cases, may lead to development of designs that decrease perforator performance. A topology optimization software integrated with a time-resolved, finite element (FE) solver is needed to determine whether the current static TO process is a reasonable cost-effective approach, or whether a more computationally-intensive, time-resolved, TO process provides a more optimized structure. In response to this need, Materials Sciences LLC will team with the recently instantiated Center for