<title>Smart isolation mount for army guns: I. Preliminary results</title>

Abstract

The work reported in this paper is focused on an effective and efficient solution, namely Smart Isolation Mount for Army Guns (SIMAG), to the weapon stabilization and fire control issues facing US Army guns. SIMAG is composed of the optimum integration of two innovative technologies. Vibration Control by Confinement and smart senor/actuator/active control systems. The combined approach may also be applied to a gun barrel to reduce its undesired vibratory motions excited by external and internal disturbances, such as gun firing action. SIMAG reconfigures the distribution and propagation of excess vibration energy and confines vibrations to certain non-critical regions or modes within a structure. Concentrated passive, active, or smart damping elements or cancellation techniques may be applied to more effectively dissipate or cancel the trapped vibrations and to prevent build up in the assembly. As the active elements, an array of collocated, PZT-based sensor- actuator sets is recommended for incorporation in SIMAG. Part of the active elements is used for spatially managing excess vibration energy while the other part is utilized for energy dissipation and cancellation. The preliminary result of our feasibility work on the SIMAG concept is demonstrated via computer simulations. It is shown that the insertion of a preliminary version of SIMAG in a 30mm gun system onboard an attack helicopter reduces the fluctuating loads and deformations measured across the helicopter bottom shell by 40 to 50 percent. SIMAG makes significant progress towards solving the firing control problems with affordable weight and power penalties by compensating for all errors in one of the two places, the turret-aircraft interface or gun barrel. Even thought the initial target application of SIMAG is airborne guns, a modified version can be incorporated into ground armors, such as tanks and humvees.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.