Northrop Grumman: Additive Manufacturing for its new LEO Warhead for Hypersonic Missiles

In late March this year at the EMPI Test Facility in Burnet, Texas, Northrop Grumman, using Internal Research and Development (IRAD) funding, demonstrated its new LEO warhead for the first time to customers competing for the DoD hypersonic weapons contracts. This new warhead development marked the first time that the company had made some of its specific warhead components -including the fragmenting inner body- using Additive Manufacturing (AM).

This 50 lb-class warhead has been designed to equip future US air-to-surface and surface-to-surface hypersonic weapons to defeat a broader range of target sets, from ground forces to light/medium vehicles and aircraft.  The new warhead leverages the company's Lethality Enhanced Ordnance (LEO) technology: a scalable fragmentation/penetration warhead solution developed by Northrop Grumman in response to a US Department of Defense (DoD) requirement that by 2019 cluster munitions containing submunitions do not result in more than 1% Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) after arming. Unlike submunitions, LEO technology uses a thinned out shell casing supplemented with an inner fragmentation layer that can be scaled according to the required target set. Northrop Grumman said that in a series of warhead tests with LEO technology achieved the army's stated requirements for area effectiveness, and left behind no UXO.