The SERDP and ESTCP Munitions Response Program held its spring In-Progress Review in May. We heard presentations from fourteen continuing projects and the MR Technical Committee met to consider FY-19 ESTCP pre-proposals. I’ll mostly highlight some of the new projects we heard from in this summary. The first day’s presentations focused on projects working on underwater munitions moblity and burial. We started off with an overview by Sarah Rennie on the “Underwater Munitions Expert System (UnMES),” the model SERDP is developing to guide installation managers in their management of underwater munitions. This was followed by a number of experimental and modeling projects that are supporting the development of UnMES. As part of this session, two new SERDP PIs presented their work. Xiaofeng Liu discussed his preliminary results on “Three-dimensional Computational Modeling of Turbulent Flow Field, Bed Morphodynamics and Liquefaction Adjacent to Munitions” and Margaret Palmsten reported on her “Probabilistic Environmental Modeling System for Munitions Mobility.”

The second day opened with presentations on two more new projects – Art Trembanis reported on “Unexploded Ordnance Characterization and Detection in Muddy Estuarine Environments,” and Andy Stewart presented his initial results on “Augmented Co-Robotics for Remediation of Military Munitions Underwater.” We are starting to support more projects focused on remediation of underwater UXO so we will have more presentations like Andy’s at future IPRs. After the morning’s talks, the Technical Committee met to consider the FY-19 ESTCP pre-proposals and then adjourned to my house for an informal dinner with some of the presenters scheduled for the next day.

The final morning of the IPR was devoted to projects developing sonar systems for detection and classification of underwater UXO. On the hardware side, Dan Brown showed us results from the first test of his “Sediment Volume Search Sonar Development”, pictured at right, and Jason Sara discussed the “Next Generation Buried Object Scanning Sonar (BOSS) for Detecting Buried UXO in Shallow Water.” Among the analysis presentations on the last day was one by Lane Owsley on “Elastic Target Modeling for Physics-Based Automatic Classification.”

All of us on the Technical Committee agreed this was one of MR’s best IPRs. I’d like to thank all the presenters (both those mentioned here and those for whom the space available didn’t allow for an individual mention) for their efforts and quality presentations.