Kevin Singer, Statistician, US Army ARDEC
Military grade systems, particularly energetic materials, require particularly high levels of safety and reliability. This need for safety and reliability extends to the required ability to stockpile munitions, often in a wide range of conditions, for relatively long periods of time. One way to demonstrate this requirement for long shelf lives is through accelerated life testing. A unique measure of the remaining life of energetic material is the degradation of stabilizer within the energetic material. The chemistry is not known precisely for this degradation, so it is assumed to take the form of an Arrhenius process with some unknown order n. During testing, the material was subject to various temperature levels and conditioned over time. JMP was used to effectively model the degradation of this stabilizer, and thus the shelf life of the energetic material, as well as characterize many aspects of the reaction kinetics with the Degradation platform and the nonlinear modeling tool. The ability to generally show the degradation over time helps us make purchasing and stockpiling decisions, and creating a kinetics model helps us develop and implement different stabilizers and mixes.