Numerical Simulation of Impact on Solid Rocket Motors

Weapons safety and vulnerability have become a major field of activities for DGA EM in the past decades. It is now a major actor, along with its state and industrial partners, for the safety evaluation and the qualification of all missiles to be fielded in the French armed forces. While test activities were presented in a previous paper [1], the present paper focuses on the simulation activities and the numerical tools developed to assess the vulnerability of solid rocket motors (SRMs) under impact loading. Finite element models for low or high velocity impact are both developed using LS-DYNA but the methods and constitutive models differ.