PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. -- For more than 50 years, the Telemetry Branch at Picatinny Arsenal has been developing and fielding gun-hardened telemetry and instrumentation solutions that collect key performance and environmental data for the development and evaluation of weapons systems, munitions, and packaging solutions.
"Telemetry means measurement at a distance," said Craig Sandberg, supervisor of the Telemetry Branch. "So since you can't be connected to the bullet to see what's going on. You need to be able to transmit that information or collect it in the air," he added.
Product Managers and designers utilize telemetry to gather information in support of design, development, analysis and qualification activities to ensure proper verification and validation of components, subsystems and tactical systems.
The Telemetry Branch is part of the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, or ARDEC. The center reports to the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command in Aberdeen, Maryland.
The telemetry engineers have expertise in High-G electronics and sensor integration, supporting a variety of customer needs, ranging from 30mm to large caliber munitions and weapon systems. Depending on what the customer needs, the branch uses sensors to measure data such as acceleration, pressure, pitch, yaw, roll, strain and temperature. Additionally, the data products collected support developmental projects, lot acceptance testing, safety critical item investigations, failure analysis, compatibility testing, and other qualification efforts.
"Sensors are also used in the SCat (Soft Catch) gun to capture the acceleration environment that the projectile or subassemblies within the projectile are exposed to during that test," said Richard Granitzki, team lead. "Sometimes a failure occurs inside the projectile during the SCat gun test. Whether that occurs or not, we are able to record what accelerations the projectile experienced," said Granitzki.
The Telemetry Branch instruments projectiles to capture both interior and exterior ballistics of munitions. The majority of the branch's project portfolio are in support of precision munitions, but it also has projects that instrument conventional munitions.
"There are a lot of smart rounds that are talking to satellites, doing processing on board and making decisions in the air," said Sandberg. "When there are failures, our job is to collect the data and give it to the engineers so that they can figure out what exactly happened."
One munition that has undergone such evaluation is the Excalibur, the Army's first all-weather, precision-guided artillery round. With sales to foreign countries, testing and evaluation continues.
Team Lead Patrick Sweeney, who recently returned from a compatibility test for the Excalibur munition, said: "We travel to multiple countries and test instrumented projectiles with their gun systems and propellants to make sure that it is safe for the Excalibur."
"The Excalibur was designed with certain weapons systems in mind," added Granitzki.
"We are now selling these to foreign governments and they don't necessarily have the same gun tubes and firing platforms that Excalibur was designed to. So, in order for us to safely sell and demonstrate the Excalibur munitions, we have to make sure that their weapons system is compatible with the Excalibur projectile."
Data captured during instrumented munitions testing goes to the aeroballistics and mechanical engineers, who evaluate their model simulation environments and either validate the simulation or create a new simulation for the environment. This process is used to update weapons and munitions designs.
With technological advances, sensors have become smaller. Greater sensor resolutions can be achieved with higher bandwidth sensors, higher sampling rates, and greater memory storage. These advancements, coupled with radar and camera systems, provide engineers with comprehensive data from multiple sensing perspectives.
Instrumented flight tests have been vital to numerous projects:
- Foreign military sales such as Excalibur, which has been successfully deployed in combat, and subsequently being sold to friendly countries. To do so, evaluation of foreign weapons systems is necessary to ensure that it is safe to demonstrate an Excalibur projectile using a foreign country's weapons system. The use of Interior Ballistics Test Projectile (IBTP), which collects acceleration and multiple pressure transducer data, has been vital to producing this necessary data.
- Field units witnessed abnormal wear of gun tubes, which required further analysis. An IBTP projectile was developed to evaluate the performance of various gun barrels, which had undergone different levels of wear and propellant residue.
- New projectile development requires validation of modeling and simulation tools. To do so, designs are prototyped and altered to accept telemetry instrumentation to characterize their performance, in-bore and in-flight.
- Guided Explosive Fragmentation Mortar: For ARDEC's in-house designed precision guided mortar, the Telemetry Branch is working with other organizations to develop a Guidance and Electronics Assembly with integrated Telemetry to reduce size requirements and costs of secondary telemetry systems.
"What we are doing today (telemetry and instrumentation) has been done for decades," added Granitzki, who compared the evolution of telemetry to the evolution of a cell phone.
"Your cell phone has evolved over the years from analog to digital. Then, flip phones because everyone wanted something small to more powerful processors in smart phones. It is the same thing with telemetry systems. The processors have gotten more powerful and smaller, better sensors are available, so we have been able to provide more capability in smaller form factors."
The telemetry branch looks forward to advancements in sensor, battery, and electronics technologies in order to meet the requirements of the next generation of munitions.
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The Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to ensure decisive overmatch for unified land operations to empower the Army, the joint warfighter and our nation. RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
Related Links:
U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) homepage
U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) homepage
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