L-008 Summary of NIMIC 1992 Workshop on Bullet/Fragment Impact and plans for future workshops

The NATO Insensitive Munitions Information Center (NIMIC) held its first Workshop on Bullet/Fragment Impact on munitions at NATO HQ in Brussels, Belgium on June 9-11, 1992. Forty specialists, including the NIMIC staff and delegates from the NIMIC participating nations (CA, FR, NL, UK and US), attended the 3 day meeting. The participants represented expertise in ballistic impacts from a total of 24 organizations including 7 from private industry. Primary objectives of the workshop were to provide a comprehensive forum for specialists to discuss the bullet/fragment impact hazards and the transfer of custodianship of the protocols (from TTCP/WAG 11 to NIMIC), couple instrumented generic tests and simulation models, and identify shortcomings and gaps between data and models. The workshop was divided into three phases. Phase I was devoted to presentations by various speakers, whose main purpose was to update the attendees on relevant data to guide participants in selecting groups which would cover their specific area of interest for the second day (phase II). The approach of dividing into several groups for Phase II was selected to increase the participants' effectiveness at the workshop and enable several aspects of bullet/fragment impact study to be discussed concurrently. Group 1 discussed the structure of bullet/fragment impact protocols. Group 2 and Group 3 addressed modeling physical phenomena, especially impact and penetration (Grp. 2) and initiation mechanisms and reaction thresholds (Grp. 3). Group 4 covered experimental contributions. Following the group discussions on day 2, the participants reassembled on day 3 to present summaries of their findings to the plenary session. This paper summarizes the approach used to conduct the above Bullet/fragment Impact workshop, the findings from the workshop and recommendations for future studies. Pressing IM technology needs and NIMIC plans for workshops to be held in 1993 are also discussed. Proceedings from the workshop are documented in a 200 page report which is available to members of defense related industries and governments of NIMIC nations.