The development of equipment to measure and monitor wear inside gun barrels : Application of the product development process

Abstract: The gun barrel is one of the most important parts of the whole artillery system. During firing, the wear leads to reduced performance and availability. Wear in gun barrels has different types of erosion mechanisms, in particular chemical-, thermal- and mechanical erosion. This takes place in the internal ballistic process when the projectile is fired from the gun barrel and it will affect the external ballistic parameters. Therefore, an equipment is needed to monitor and measure the wear inside different calibre gun barrels. Wear in gun barrels takes place under extreme conditions during firing due tohigh gas pressures and high temperatures arise as propellant burns. The present thesis aims to develop a type of measuring equipment that should be able to measure and monitor wear inside gun barrels between the diameter ranges of A-C mm. In this master thesis, the product development process has been adapted in order to reach the following goal which is to accomplish a technical solution for the problem associated with wear in gun barrels. The product development process is a systematical approach of developing new products. The different steps that have been evaluated are the product specification, generation of concepts, selection of concepts and layout- and detail design. Before these steps where performed, a project plan was done in order to organize the project. This was then followed by a literature review to obtain information about the problems in the project and to find inspiration from similar applications. The results of the product development process led to a concept of a moveable measure-head which uses a crawler to move inside the gun barrel and adapters to be able to use inside different calibre gun barrels. Then a rotating 3D-laser scanner to measure the change in diameter of the bore. A laser distance sensor and a receiver in order to measure the straightness and to be able to know the position of the moving measure-head in the gun barrel. At last, a wireless camera to monitor the wear inside the gun barrel. The selected concept has been developed and potential solutions for the problem have been described and formed. For the next phase of the project, the concept needs to be developed into a complete model. The next phase of the project is the prototype testing phase.