TERMINAL BALLISTICS APPLICATION OF X-RAY COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY (XCT) FOR THE QUANTITATIVE IN-SITU ANALYSIS OF FRAGMENTS EMBEDDED IN COLLECTION MEDIA

摘要

The characterization of fragmenting munitions involves conducting arena tests with witness materials (e.g. plywood) to collect fragments. The evaluation of body armour against buried explosives follows a similar process where surrogates made of foam or gel are used to support the armour and capture penetrating soil debris. The manual recovery of the collected fragments is long, tedious and prone to error since small fragments are often not detected. The effectiveness of XCT as a rapid non-destructive technique was evaluated by scanning calibration targets containing various objects of known material types, sizes, and locations. The Fragfinder program was developed to automatically perform 3D images analysis. All fragments were detected and accurately located. For lower density materials (glass, aluminum, titanium), the relative error on the volume of the fragment was within 8%. For higher density materials, (steel, tungsten), larger errors were obtained because of image reconstruction artifacts. Finer reconstruction of target scans using smaller voxel sizes along with artifacts reduction algorithms were explored in order to obtain better precision.