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Published February 1971 | Published
Journal Article Open

Explosive Gas Blast: The Expansion of Detonation Products in Vacuum

Abstract

A series of 0.2- to 3-gm HNS charges were detonated in vacuums of 10^−3 to 10^−5 Torr. The resultant freely expanding, detonation product, gas blast achieves terminal velocities of 8 to 12 km/sec within 3 to 5 µsec after the detonation wave arrives at the free surface. Measured pressure profiles display rise times to maximum stagnation (``reflected shock'') pressure varying from ~30 µsec, 20-cm away from a 2.6-gm charge, to ~185 µsec, 127-cm away from 0.2-gm charge at 10−5 Torr. Rise times were generally shorter at 10−3 and 10−4 Torr; the 10−5 Torr values agree with numerical calculations. Using cube root scaling of charge mass, the observed peak reflected pressure as a function of range may be represented by p = 6.5 x 10^5 (bar) r'^-3.5, where r[prime] the ratio of the range to the equivalent charge radius.

Additional Information

© 1971 The American Institute of Physics. Received 18 May 1970; revised 4 September 1970. This research was sponsored in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) under contract NAS 9-5885, and partially supported by contracts NAS 9-5632 and NGL 05-020-232 to Stanford University and contract NGL 05-002-105 to the California Institute of Technology. The experiments and many of the calculations were performed while the authors were staff members of the Poulter Laboratory at SRI. We appreciate the able computational help of J.O. Erkman, G.M. Muller, and especially D. Gerneth who carried out the results of Table III. We are indebted to D. Stevens who helped with the initial explosive preparation and to R. Goettelman and B. Loo who helped analyze the data.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 17, 2023