The Testing Blog

The Ordnance Sciences Division within the NTS Defense Group has been fortunate this year to participate as co-authors with the NSWC Crane, Detachment Fallbrook, ESED customer and support their presentation of papers at two NDIA conferences.  The paper presentations were: “High Speed Digital Infrared Imaging of the M201A1 Grenade Fuze Initiation Train,” that was presented at the NDIA Fuze Conference in May 2010, and “Pyrotechnic Shock Loading of the M82 Percussion Primer in the M777 Light Weight Howitzer Magazine Assembly,” that was presented at the NDIA Joint Armaments Conference, also in May 2010.  More recently, Ryan Hill and Jon Conner of the NTS Ordnance Sciences Division presented a paper at the Gun Tube Tube M3 Symposium hosted by the US Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD in July 2010.  The title of this paper was “Transient Heat Transfer Model to Support Rapid Trade Studies of Machine Gun Barrel Geometries and Materials.”

The Ordnance Sciences Division at NTS recently added the capability to perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis to their suite of high end engineering analysis software tools.  The CFD software acquired included CFDesign from Blue Ridge Numerics and FloTHERM from Mentor Graphics.  CFDesign is ideally suited for general purpose internal and external flow analysis including high speed compressible flow (up to Mach 5) and can accommodate rotating projectiles such as the 81 mm HE Mortar Projectile shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. CFDesign Analysis of the External Flow Around an 81 mm Mortar Projectile at 225 fps.

FloTHERM is ideally suited for the solution of heat transfer problems incorporating conduction, convection, and radiation phenomena with complex assemblies (including electronic circuit boards) and incompressible fluids.  An example of the steady state flow induced in the surrounding air by natural convection heat transfer from an electronics enclosure is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. FloTherm Analysis of Natural Convection Through a Wall Mounted Electronics Enclosure.

If you’re performing testing on a Mac and looking for a simple application to ghost/image the hard drive, take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner. I know it seems like you should be able to just copy all the files to an external hard drive and just select it from the Startup Disk preference pane, but it doesn’t work in MacOS X. And, if you’re doing a lot of configuration testing, installation/uninstallation, etc., it would be really handy to have an identical copy of the hard drive, right? Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to the rescue.

Just install CCC (or SuperDuper!) and you can clone a low-level copy of your internal hard drive to another partition or drive. It’s very handy, and if you really want a good backup, you can have it scheduled to update the cloned image so you’ll always have the latest version of all your hard drive files. When my hard drive suffered an unfortunate failure a few years ago, I had no worries – I had an identical copy of my hard drive all setup which allowed me to recover all my work on another Mac. It’s fast, accurate, and donation-ware so you can try it out before you buy.