Quantitative Assessment Method of Muzzle Smoke in a Field Environment

The muzzle of barrel weapons produces a large amount of smoke (muzzle smoke), a major source of pollution in the battlefield. Quantitative assessment of muzzle smoke is an important support for the development of advanced propellants. However, due to the lack of effective measurement methods for field experiments, most of the previous studies were based on a smoke box, and few studies have focused on muzzle smoke in the field environment. In view of the nature of the muzzle smoke and the conditions of the field environment, the characteristic quantity of muzzle smoke (CQMS) was defined based on the Beer-Lambert law in this paper. CQMS is used to characterize the danger level of muzzle smoke produced by the propellant charge, and theoretical calculations indicated that when the transmittance is e ^-2, the impact of the measurement errors on CQMS can be minimized. Seven firings with the same propellant charge of a 30 mm gun were carried out in a field environment to verify the effectivity of CQMS. The measurement uncertainty analysis on the experimental results showed that the CQMS of the propellant charge used in this study was 2.35 ± 0.06 m², which indicates that CQMS can be used to quantitatively assess muzzle smoke.