Mechanical and Thermal Properties of Advanced Ceramics for Gun Barrel Applications

Book excerpt: Eight commercially available ceramic materials were procured and evaluated for potential application as gun barrel liners. These materials included an alumina, zirconia, and SiAlON, as well as three silicon carbides and two silicon nitrides. Preliminary evaluation determined the strengths, fracture toughness, Vickers hardness, thermal conductivity, specific heat, and linear coefficient of thermal expansion. An uncensored Weibull analysis was performed on all of the strength data. These databases were developed for use in the probabilistic modeling and design efforts of the program to predict performance, identify optimum gun barrel designs, and to rank and down select ceramics for further evaluation.