ASSESSMENT OF NEED FOR SOLDER IN MODELING POTTED ELECTRONICS DURING GUN-SHOT

Smart projectiles use electronic components such as circuit boards with integrated circuits to control guidance and fuzing operations. During gun-launch, the electronics are subjected to 3-dimensional g-forces as high as 15000-gs. The US Army uses finite element analysis to simulate electronics with high-g, dynamic loads. Electronics are difficult to model due to the large variation in size, from large circuit boards, to very small solder joints and solder pads. This means that to accurately model such small features would require very large models that are computationally expensive to analyze, often beyond the capability of resources available. Therefore small features such as solder joints are often not included in the finite element models to make the models computationally tractable. The question is: what is the effect on model accuracy without these small features in the model.