Metal Storm Limited
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| Public | |
| Traded as | ASX: MST |
| Industry | Defense |
| Fate | voluntary administration |
| Founded | 1994 |
| Headquarters | Brisbane, Australia |
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Key people
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Terence James O'Dwyer, Chairman |
| Website | http://www.metalstorm.com/ |
Metal Storm Limited was a research and development company based in Brisbane, Australia that specialized in electronically initiated superposed load weapons technology and owned the proprietary rights to the electronic ballistics technology invented by J. Mike O'Dwyer. The Metal Storm name applied to both the company and technology.
Metal Storm used the concept of superposed load; multiple projectiles loaded nose to tail in a single gun barrel with propellant packed between them. The Roman candle, a traditional firework design, employs the same basic concept, however, the propellant continues to burn in the Roman candle's barrel, igniting the charge behind the subsequent projectile. The process is repeated by each charge in turn, ensuring that all projectiles in the barrel are discharged sequentially from the single ignition. Various methods of separately firing each propellant package behind stacked projectiles have been proposed which would allow a "shoot on demand" capability more suitable to firearms.
J. Mike O'Dwyer, an Australian inventor, observed that these methods did not eliminate the problem of unintended propellant ignition caused by highly pressurized hot gases "leaking" past the remaining projectiles in the barrel (blow-by) and igniting their charges. J. Mike O'Dwyer's original Metal Storm patents demonstrated a method whereby projectiles placed in series along the length of a barrel could be fired sequentially and selectively without the danger associated with unintended propellant ignition.
In the original Metal Storm patents, the propellant immediately behind the projectile closest to the muzzle of the gun barrel was ignited by an electronically fired primer, the projectile was set in motion, and at the same time a reactive force acted on the remaining stacked projectiles in the barrel, pushing them backwards. By design, the remaining projectiles would distort under this load, expanding radially against the gun barrel wall. This created a seal (obturation), which prevented the hot propellant gases (expanding behind the lead projectile) from leaking past them and prematurely igniting the remaining propellant charges in the barrel. As each of these propellant charges was selectively (electronically) ignited, the force "unlocked" the projectile in front and propelled it down the gun barrel, and reinforced the radial expansion (and hence the seal) between the projectiles remaining in the barrel and the barrel wall.
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Wikipedia