If you look at most pre smokeless guns and cannons, you can often see them having a design that makes sense when it comes to their overall thickness. They are typically wider (often having “hoops”) closer to the breach area for obvious reasons as it’s where the explosion happened. But what I don’t understand is why they often had a slightly flared out bit at the extreme end of the barrel often called “muzzle face”, as often they would try to avoid putting a lot of weight on the extreme end as it would make it harder to move (aiming wise).
In: Engineering
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The muzzle is a point of vulnerability.
While pressure inside the gun decreases the further forward you get (so a lot of cannons get thinner) there is nothing in front of the muzzle holding the barrel together. If the muzzle swell (that’s what it’s called) wasn’t there to reinforce the gun there is a chance the pressure inside would make the barrel peel back like a banana.
The reason that the end of the muzzle often has a thicker ring about it is all about force distribution. When the middle of the barrel is pressurized by gasses inside it it tries to expand. However it is held in place by the tension created around the axle of the barrel. It is also held in place because it is pulling on the barrel ahead of it and behind it. So the load is distributed along 3 directions.
However when you get to the muzzle it only has the axle and the muzzle behind it, it doesn’t have anything ahead of it to help hold it in place. So it needs extra thickening there to help prevent it from turning into a peeled banana.
In general they aren’t instead what they tend to have is reinforcement around the end of the barrel as that part of the gun has substantial stress on it.
The muzzle is the point where the gases escape and flare out in all directions. It needs to be reinforced because unlike the mid section of the rest of the barrel, it has nothing to hold onto so to speak. Stress fractures could form at the end of the barrel and eventually it could blow outwards like petals on a flower. Reinforcing this particular area helped prevent this. It also allowed for balancing the gun while maintaining a smaller form factor and allowing for more flexibility on carriage designs too.
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