SBIR-STTR Award

The overall objective of the proposal is to develop and demonstrate a recently developed metal treatment and combine it with alternative barrel designs. Dark Metal Technology (DMT) is a unique technology that provides a highly wear resistant and self-lubricious surface for finished steel parts in military weapons. DMT improves the performance of machine gun barrel steel by providing: • Outstanding wear resistance, high lubricity, and anti-galling without increasing hardness for both low and high grade carbon steel alloys used in machine gun components. • Maintain dimensionally stable parts, whose surface tolerances are unaffected, because there is no build up on surfaces from diffusion treatments. • A process that can be used both on new parts and field service parts as well.

Keywords:
Steel, Steel, Surface Lubriciousness, Stainless, Fouling Resistance, Abrasion Resistance, Anti-Galling, Enhanced Service Life, Wear Reduction

NATL will perform additional extreme live fire schedules beyond the exploratory scope of Phase 1. NATL will push Dark Metal's capability to thermally manage abrasion and wear resistance demonstrated in Phase 1. NATL will further push previouse live fire round counts to the extreme to demonstrate minimized fouling and carbon adhesion within chromeless chambers, bores, rifling and extend this treatment to internal component lifetime improvements.

Keywords:
Enahnced Fire Control Systems, Enahnced Fire Control Systems, Chromeless, Thermal Stability, Wear Resistance, Chromeless Rifling, Extended Operational Lifetimes, Inexpensive T