Study on High‐pressure Erosion Rate Model of Propellant Gas to Gun Barrel

ABSTRACT In order to construct a method for evaluating the erosion performance of gun propellant, semi‐closed bomb experiments at different pressures were designed. Meanwhile, a transient numerical simulation model based on the experimental condition was established, which could simulate the space‐time distributions of wall temperature of the erosion tube under different pressures. Then, the high‐pressure erosion rate model was proposed, and the model parameters were solved by the particle swarm optimization algorithm and the database of the temperature and pressure (obtained through numerical simulation and experiment, respectively). The results showed that the erosion duration of the erosion tube became shorter, while the area of the high temperature zone of the erosion tube increased as the working pressure increased from 170 to 366 MPa. The optimized pre‐exponential factor ( A ), the apparent activation energy ( E ), and pressure index ( n ) were 0.0365 s −1 , 218.2 kJ∙mol −1 , and 1.120 for the selected propellant sample and steel for the erosion tube, respectively. At this time, the average relative deviation between the ablation amount calculated by the erosion rate model and that measured through experiments was 2.0%. This work provided a proof‐of‐concept of the high‐pressure erosion rate model and validated the model's performance, which could contribute to the establishment of the erosion performance evaluation method of gun barrels.