Numerical study of a one stage gas gun

Gas guns of either one or two stages are very useful and common tools during the testing of aircrafts and spacecrafts, in such a way that they must be able of reproducing many different impact situations, from a bird impact on a civil aircraft to a meteorite hit on a satellite. In order to adequately reproduce each situation during and impact test, the most important parameters to be controlled are muzzle speed and pro- jectile mass and dimensions. Because of this, the appropriate gun should be used when running and impact test according to its design features. In this paper, the different issues of a Single stage gas gun are to be dis- cussed and analyzed. The different parts of the gun are to be studied with the objective of optimizing the design and understanding its performance. To do so, mainly numerical calculations will be performed by means of software LS-Dyna, specifically the new compressible solver tool. Adition- ally, an experimental prototype devoted to support the calculations will be designed and built.Ingeniería Aeroespacia