NUMERICAL SIMULATION TO ESTIMATE DELAY BETWEEN PRECURSOR AND MAIN SHAPED CHARGE WARHEAD

Modern day's tanks are protected by an Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) to provide enhanced protection. Tandem warhead is used to defeat the ERA. It comprises of a small shaped charge warhead (generally called precursor warhead) which is placed in front of Main shaped charge warhead. After initiation of precursor warhead, explosive gases from precursor warhead along with the debris of precursor warhead and other components (if any between Precursor warhead and main warhead), starts expanding and accelerate towards Main warhead. Main warhead should be initiated at an appropriate time so that gases and debris from the precursor do not hinder with jet formation process of Main warhead or cause any structural damage to it. In addition, initiation of Main warhead should be delayed so as to give enough time for clearing of ERA plates in front of target. It is always desirable to initiate main warhead with an optimized time delay. Time delay between initiations of these two shaped charge warheads, play a vital role in performance of main warhead. Time delay depends on design of precursor warhead, distance between two warheads and also on components placed in between them which serves as obstacles to the expending gases. This article is focused on numerical simulations for estimating initiation time delay between two warheads using LSDyna software along with experiments carried out to validate the estimated delay.