page_title: Vortex ring gun
section_title: The 1998 US Army project
hierarchical_section_title: Vortex ring gun / History / The 1998 US Army project
caption_attribution_description: English: A military police Soldier provides security with his MK19-3 40mm grenade machine gun while seated in the turret of his humvee. The Soldier is assigned to the 4th Infantry Division's 4th Military Police Company. The unit provided an escort for Soldiers of the 230th Finance Battalion and the 443rd Civil Affairs Battalion, who were overseeing the Iraqi Currency Exchange in Balad, Iraq.
context_page_description: The vortex ring gun is an experimental non-lethal weapon for crowd control that uses high-energy vortex rings of gas to knock down people or spray them with marking ink or other chemicals.
  The concept was explored by the US Army starting in 1998, and by some commercial firms. Knockdown of distant individuals currently seems unlikely even if the rings are launched at theoretical maximum speed. As for the delivery of chemicals, leakage during flight is still a problem.
  Weapons based on similar principles but different designs and purposes have been described before, typically using acetylene-air or hydrogen–oxygen explosions to create and propel the vortices.
context_section_description: The United States Army Research Laboratory was asked by the Marine Corps Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate to determine whether vortex rings could be used for non-lethal crowd control. Overall management authority for the study was assigned to the United States Army Materiel Command, with support by ARDEC. Contributors to the study included individuals from the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Adaptive Research Incorporated, Berkeley Research Associates, EWS Limited, Johns Hopkins University, Pennsylvania State University, Sara Corporation, and  Sonic Development Laboratory.
   The end product was to be a kit for quickly converting an existing lethal weapon to a non-lethal vortex ring generator that could knock-down an individual or spray him with a dye, malodorous chemical, or incapacitating chemical. The kit, consisting of a nozzle with chemical reservoirs and belts of blank 40mm cartridges modified to detonate at pressures up to 100,000 psi (690 KN/sqN), was being designed for the Navy MK19-3. The 40mm grenade machine gun was selected because firing at 4-10 shots per second resonates with many body parts and causes a stronger impact effect.
  Single shot field tests performed without optimized nozzles led to the conclusion vortex rings were unsuitable for non-lethal crowd control.  This conclusion was reached partly because knock down did not appear to be feasible at the desired range of 100 feet (30 m), partly because of the excessive spillage onto bystanders under the flight path if used to transport chemicals or dyes, and partly because the flight noise and speed enabled it to be easily avoided at the downrange target.  The foremost reliability issue with this project was turbulence caused by the high-energy propellant burning outside the barrel.
caption: Figure 4. MK19-3 40mm grenade launch machine gun.
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