An Overview of AMO-CAT: DDESB’s Explosives Safety Knowledge
Improvement Program
Robert T. Conway, Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center
1100 23rd Ave., Port Hueneme, CA 93043-4370
Dr. Ali Amini, Department of Defense Explosives Safety Board
Suite 16E12 4800 Mark Center Drive Alexandria, VA
Brandon Fryman, APT Research, Inc.
4950 Research Drive Huntsville, AL 35805
Keywords: explosives safety, explosives testing, explosives modeling, earth-covered magazines
Abstract
A critical mission of the Department of Defense Explosives Safety Board (DDESB) is to develop
standards and tools to ensure the safety associated with DOD explosives as they go through their
life cycle of manufacturing, transport, storage, dismantling and demilitarization. In the 2000s, in
an attempt to enhance the standards and develop new tools, DDESB embarked on a long term
program of Explosives Safety Knowledge IMprovement Operation – REdux (ESKIMORE). At
present most of the originally planned ESKIMORE work has been completed and reported on, but
critical technology gaps and challenging issues remain to be addressed. This paper provides an
overview of the current technology and information gaps identified, followed by a detailed
description of a new explosives safety knowledge improvement program, Advanced Munitions
Operations – Consequence Assessment Trials (AMO-CAT).
AMO-CAT is an integrated computational and testing program for development of new and/or
enhancement of existing standards in support of explosives safety operations. The project is an
attempt to integrate testing, advance computations, and engineering model development for
explosives storage and demilitarization operations, protective construction, and risk assessment.
Advance computations are of particular importance when full-scale testing is not practical.
Phenomenology areas to be considered include blast and primary fragmentation, structural breakup
and fragmentations, internal blast, mass fire, and underwater explosions.
This paper shall summarize the priority technology gaps being addressed under AMO-CAT, and
how they will be realized. The testing and modeling efforts currently being conducted under AMO-
CAT shall be summarized, as well as planned computational and empirical programs planned for
the next five years. The ultimate goal of AMO-CAT is to enhance the state-of-the-art of explosives
safety by utilizing a complimentary approach of testing and computational analysis to enhance
understanding of explosion effects for ultimate incorporation into quantity-distance (QD) criteria
and consequence assessment models. With full-scale testing being prohibitively expensive, it is
