Monte carlo analysis of ambient temperature influence on cook-off in 155 mm howitzer barrels

This study establishes a novel stochastic framework for evaluating cook-off risk in 155 mm howitzer barrels, addressing the limitations of traditional safety assessments based on deterministic models. By integrating a physically representative Weibull-distributed heat flux, validated against conventional exponential models through energy equivalence, with a computationally optimized Monte Carlo simulation, we quantify the influence of ambient temperature variability on bore temperatures. The underlying one-dimensional transient heat conduction model, solved with an highly optimized one dimensional finite difference method, treats ambient temperature as a random variable using both uniform distributions (based on MIL-STD-810H environmental limits) and truncated Gaussian distributions representing real-world climates in the Donbas and Kherson regions. Results demonstrate that ambient temperature should be one of the important aspects when evaluating cook-off risk. Depending on heat flux intensity, the safe firing limit varies by up to 12 rounds. At high thermal loads, cook-off becomes inevitable regardless of environmental conditions, whereas at lower loads, it remains a low-probability event confined to extreme temperatures. Application to realistic regional climate profiles provides localized, probabilistic firing envelopes, enabling more accurate operational safety guidelines. These findings highlight the limitations of deterministic approaches and demonstrate the necessity of stochastic modeling for reliable thermal risk assessment in modern artillery systems.