What project AH6 buys
This project investigates, models, and assesses energetic material and propulsion technologies to validate novel concepts such as maximizing total energy density and power delivered on target. This project also optimizes propellant grains for increased range and altering gun configurations to increase energy on target in order to exploit the controllable/scalable energy release required for improving effectiveness and reducing vulnerability of future gun/missile systems. Work in this project complements Program Element (PE) 0601102A (Defense Research Sciences) / Project AA7 (Mechanics and Ballistics), PE 0602141A (Lethality Technology) / Project AH7 (Lethality and Scalable Effects Technologies), PE 0602141A (Lethality Technology) / Project AH8 (Lethality Materials and Processes Technology), and PE 0602144A (Ground Technology) / Project BL1 (Materials and Manufacturing Research Technology) Work in this project is performed by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Chemical Biological Center (CBC).
Project AH6 funding, FY2025–FY2031
Prior years are actuals, the budget year is the request, and the outyears are the FYDP plan. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure. Projects carry the full five-year plan; the activities inside them stop at the budget year.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 9.5 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 5.0 |
| FY2027 | Request | 27.6 |
| FY2028 | Outyear | 19.5 |
| FY2029 | Outyear | 17.7 |
| FY2030 | Outyear | 18.0 |
| FY2031 | Outyear | 17.4 |
2 accomplishments / planned programs
The R-2A exhibit — the only level of the budget that describes work that has not happened yet. Activities carry the prior, current and budget year only, no five-year plan. 1 of them describes FY2027 work in enough detail to have its own page; the rest are shown here in full. Coverage is partial across the corpus, so count activities, never total them.
Will mature biological synthesis and biomanufacturing to produce multi-kilogram quantities of energetic materials for formulation assessments; design and develop AI models for additional bio-reachable precursors for advanced energetics applications; begin conducting experiments for scale-up of next precursor molecule; designs and…
Read the FY2027 plan →FY2027 planned work Will develop advanced materials and formulations containing energetic materials, energetic formulation ingredients, and metallic fuels for enhanced lethality and extended range; develop novel analytic techniques to accelerate screening of high performing materials and transition to government and industrial partners; apply coarse-grain methodologies to candidate formulations of non-homogeneous systems; assess reactive materials concepts for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) defeat; develop machine learning models for prediction of formulation performance and response to injury.
FY2026 to FY2027 change Funding decrease is an economic adjustment.
FY2026 plans — current year Will design a optimized process to evaluate synthetic biology cellulose precursor materials and follow on nitrocellulose synthesis; develop scaled up formulations of novel energetic materials, plasticizers, polymers, and fuels for characterization and performance assessment; complete assessment of candidate reactive materials for munition applications and transition; refine coarse-grain mesoscale models and couple to continuum level modeling capability for non-homogeneous systems; develop advanced processing techniques for manufacturing of propellant and explosive munition formulations; develop machine learning models for rapid prediction of performance and survivability of novel materials.
FY2025 accomplishments Will assess novel energetic materials and synthetically biomanufacturer precursor materials, and fuels previously discovered for scale up and formulation; conduct experiments and validate the in-house integrated materials engine and mesoscale model framework to assess precursor cellulose strain processing, and scale up of nitrocellulose synthesis, strength models that incorporate higher-fidelity physics such as crystal plasticity, crystallographic slip, and/or shear banding; determine final candidate reactive materials for further validation and transition. Assess quantum mechanical and/or machine learning models of reaction kinetics for computational fluid dynamic simulations of propellant…