Processing of Ceramic Rifled Gun Barrel

Abstract

Ceramic gun barrels have the potential to provide a significant increase in barrel life as well as reduction in weight for small caliber systems. The potential use of ceramic tubes as gun barrels may be severely limited due to the difficulty in introducing the rifling on the inner diameter. The processing of ceramic gun barrels with internal rifling pattern poses a tremendous processing challenge to the materials community. The rifling lands and grooves and desired twist rate, coupled with the difficulty of machining ceramics, makes the economic manufacturing of such gun barrels extremely difficult. The current paper describes the preliminary efforts of fabricating an alumina gun barrel tube that was around 100-mm long with a 25-mm inner diameter (ID), a 33-mm outer diameter, and eight lands and eight grooves. Over and above the lands and grooves in the ID, the barrel had to have a 10:1 twist (one complete twist in 250-mm) incorporated into it. The paper will describes our preliminary attempts at processing such a rifled gun barrel tube made of alumina.