Automated Shaped Charge Design: Applying Dakota Optimization to CTH Kinetic Energy Results

Advances in computational power present an opportunity to further optimize the design of an engineered energetic system. This work presents the application of a proposed optimization scheme which combines the shock-physics hydrocode CTH with the DAKOTA optimization package to automate shaped-charge jet design. The formation of an explosively driven hypervelocity jet is highly dependent on the original shaped charge liner geometry. By parameterizing this geometry, and by developing a characteristic objective function from CTH simulations, a process can be established where the Dakota code iteratively builds an optimal shaped charge. This work attempts to use this methodology to reproduce a reference geometry. This is done by characterizing the liner geometry with two parabolas and post-processing an objective function from the kinetic energy profile of the resulting jet. Multi-dimensional parameter studies, gradient optimizations and genetic algorithms are used to probe the parameter space