WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- AFRL and the Department of Energy's Kansas City Plant are collaborating to provide ordnance designers the initiation tools necessary for developing focused warheads, such as the dual-role munition. These advanced weapons will require an interdisciplinary technical solution that incorporates aerodynamic, energetic, warhead, target detection, and initiation system technologies. One of the tools currently in development is the Adaptable Miniature Initiation System Technology (AMIST), which is a multipoint initiation system designed to detonate explosive warheads.
AFRL is developing a distributed multipoint initiation system that has highly accurate and precise timing between fire points. Precision multipoint initiation gives warhead designers the ability to control the detonation front from a weapon via the initiation sequence of fire points located within the explosive fill. The resulting munition is able to bias the path of its fragments and thus increase the explosive energy directed towards the selected target.
The current system architecture, AMIST Configuration II, can program multiple fire points to operate autonomously upon disconnect from the controller. Users can program the fire points to fire simultaneously or sequentially (with negligible timing error).
AMIST Configuration II is the first multipoint initiation system to combine high timing precision with fire point autonomy. Each fire point consists of a logic board with built-in processing and memory, a firing capacitor, high-voltage switch, and the explosive detonator. A centralized controller uses a data bus to communicate with the fire points to update firing modes at rapid intervals. Users can program firing modes into the multipoint system, and each mode produces a different warhead effect. The centralized controller selects the warhead mode based on the location of a given target relative to the warhead, a method that optimizes lethality by focusing the explosive energy in a specific direction. Upon receiving the fire command, each fire point can disconnect from the data bus without affecting operational performance. Once disconnected, the fire point no longer receives firing mode updates from the controller.
Instead, it operates completely autonomously, using its own internal processor and memory to detonate at the time that corresponds to the selected firing mode. AMIST has proven itself as a precise and reliable means of achieving focused lethality for future weapon systems by the use of multipoint initiation.