Measurement of firing impulse force in rifles

During the recoil phenomenon, elevated forces are exerted within a period of time of few milliseconds. In this paper we developed a new experimental setup to determine the impulsive force exerted on the shoulder of the shooter during the firing action. The combined use of a load cell and a pressure matrix is found to be essential to achieve a complete characterization of the firing shock force due to the recoil. The experimental results have shown that the correlation between the two measuring systems allows to obtain a quantitative measure of the event of recoil. Indeed, the pressure matrix has proved to be able to detect the peak pressure and the corresponding peak force, whereas the load cell has allowed to investigate the temporal evolution of the force that is transmitted to the shoulder of the individual. Therefore, the analysis of the forces has shown how the combined use of two sensors is capable of achieving the maximum confidence with the experimental data as the two systems are complementary.