Book Description

Plastic-bonded explosives are heterogeneous materials. Experimentally, shock initiation is sensitive to small amounts of porosity, due to the formation of hot spots (small localized regions of high temperature). This leads to the Ignition and Growth concept, introduced by Lee and Tarver in 1980, as the basis for reactive burn models. A homogeneized burn rate needs to account for three mesoscale physical effects (i) the density of burnt hot spots, which depends on the lead shock strength; (ii) the growth of the burn fronts triggered by hot spots, which depends on the local deflagration speed; (iii) a geometric factor that accounts for the overlap of deflagration wavelets from adjacent hot spots. These effects can be combined and the burn model defined by specifying the reaction progress variable [lambda](t) as a function of a dimensionless reaction length [tau]{sub hs}(t)/l{sub hs}, rather than by xpecifying an explicit burn rate. The length scale l{sub hs} is the average distance between hot spots, which is proportional to [N{sub hs}(P{sub s})]−13, where N{sub hs} is the number density of hot spots activated by the lead shock. The reaction length [tau]{sub hs}(t) = {line_integral}0{sup t} D(P(t'))dt' is the distance the burn front propagates from a single hot spot, where D is the deflagration speed and t is the time since the shock arrival. A key implementation issue is how to determine the lead shock strength in conjunction with a shock capturing scheme. They have developed a robust algorithm for this purpose based on the Hugoniot jump condition for the energy. The algorithm utilizes the time dependence of density, pressure and energy within each cell. The method is independent of the numerical dissipation used for shock capturing. It is local and can be used in one or more space dimensions. The burn model has a small number of parameters which can be calibrated to fit velocity gauge data from shock initiation experiments.