Nuclear weaponsTests with Sandia’s Davis gun aid B61-12 life extension effort
Three years of design, planning and preparation came down to a split second, a loud boom and an enormous splash in a successful impact test of hardware in the nose assembly of an unarmed, mock B61-12 nuclear bomb. The Sandia National Laboratories test also captured data that will allow analysts to validate computer models of the bomb, part of Sandia’s decade-long effort in the B61-12 Life Extension Program (LEP). An LEP is a way to extend the life of an aging weapon without adding new military capability. The B61-12 LEP is an $8.1 billion National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) program coordinated across the nation’s nuclear security enterprise.
Three years of design, planning and preparation came down to a split second, a loud boom and an enormous splash in a successful impact test of hardware in the nose assembly of an unarmed, mock B61-12 nuclear bomb.
The Sandia National Laboratories test also captured data that will allow analysts to validate computer models of the bomb, part of Sandia’s decade-long effort in the B61-12 Life Extension Program (LEP). An LEP is a way to extend the life of an aging weapon without adding new military capability. The B61-12 LEP is an $8.1 billion National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) program coordinated across the nation’s nuclear security enterprise.
A Sandia Lab release reports that Sandia is working with the NNSA, the program lead, and five NNSA partner sites, industry partners and the U.S. Air Force, the B61-12 customer.
The test, the first of three with Sandia’s cannon-like Davis gun, shot the assembly and its diagnostics into an 8-foot-deep steel-reinforced concrete water tank with a soil-filled bunker underneath to capture the hardware. The packed-dirt bunker makes it easier for engineers to recover data recorders and reusable parts and ensures that a test piece isn’t damaged.
The tests were designed to validate a systems requirement for the B61-12 and represented a worst-case scenario: a slow velocity into a soft target, in this case, 10,500 gallons of water. Shots were set for a prescribed velocity and angle to validate the impact sensor response for ground fuzing and to help understand the design margin, said Tyler Keil, lead engineer for the B61-12 Davis gun test series.
Keil and more than a dozen colleagues who worked on the test watched the 28 January shot from a hill a half-mile from the mobile Davis gun, stationed at New Mexico Tech’s Energetic Materials Research & Testing Center (EMRTC) in the hills west of the Socorro campus.
“Awesome” test highlighted years of work
“It was awesome,” Keil said after the shot. Keil, who worked toward the test for more than three years, brought team members to EMRTC so they could watch a highlight of their work: shooting a mock bomb out of the gun. Waning sunlight meant waiting until the next day to recover test data, and Keil joked he had “determine how happy I really am” after seeing that data.
