Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel (COPV) Energetic Rupture and Intentional Burst Test Series

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Office of Safety and Mission Assurance for Pressure Systems has a requirement to develop, maintain, and reuse lightweight pressure vessels for ongoing and future space missions. These tanks are called Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) and are lightweight pressure vessels capable of storing a large variety of pressurized gases in different volumes. However, the lightweight requirement comes at an increased risk of tank rupture due to the materials used in manufacturing. These include carbon fiber, fiberglass, plastic, and/or aluminum.

To mitigate and analyze this risk, NASA has developed a fragmentation software package to predict fragmentation effects from a COPV rupture event. As with all software simulation packages, real-world data is required to refine the results, making the simulation more representative of the rupture event. Therefore, NASA partnered with the US Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Aviation and Missile Center (AvMC) at Redstone Arsenal, AL to perform intentional rupture and burst testing to help feed the software program with real-world data to further refine the fragmentation parameters. This testing was conducted at the AvMC Intentional Detonation Facility (also known as the “Snake Pit”) from 8-22 AUG 2024.

The overall objective of the test series was to execute a twenty-six (26) shot test matrix on (6) different COPVs, where the tanks would produce fragments via an intentional rupture event or a natural burst event. The tanks would be remotely filled with pressurized gaseous nitrogen (N2) at a controlled fill rate to ensure that the COPVs would not exceed the individual temperature thresholds due to gas compression. High speed cameras placed around the test area would record the fragmentation events to obtain velocity magnitudes and vectors. Additionally, blast overpressure sensors were placed near the tanks for majority of the shots to obtain blast overpressure curves of each event.

This test report will go into further detail of this overarching test series, including test setup descriptions, test methodology and data analysis techniques, as well as a reporting of the final data recorded by each test event.