Research on the floating performance of a novel large caliber machine gun based on the floating principle with complicated boundary conditions

In this paper, a novel large caliber machine gun was taken as the research object to analyze the floating technique based on the principle of fixed-point constraint and secondary counter-recoil. A rigid-flexible coupling multi-body dynamic model of the large caliber machine gun with muzzle brake based on floating principle was established, in which the influence of soil and human body was taken into account. The dynamic simulation was conducted and then the results were compared with the corresponding experimental data The dynamic characteristics of the machine gun with or without floating technique were analyzed to indicate the influence of floating technique upon the performance of the gun. Furthermore, the rigid-flexible coupling dynamic models with five different firing angles was constructed to study the influence caused by the angles. The results indicated that the floating mechanism could reduce the recoil effectively and improve the operational performance of this novel large caliber machine gun.