A Phenomenological Drag Law in Blast-Soil Interaction

Abstract

One challenge associated with the simulation of buried detonations involves the treatment of the multiphase phenomena related to the soil. At the moment when the soil shatters into a dense particulate cloud with detonation products escaping through the soil particles, the continuum model that assumes a single velocity shared by the blast gas and the soil at any given point no longer holds. Instead momentum coupling between the two phases has to be modeled. One characteristic at the stage of soil breaking is that the soil fragments packed in a tight configuration under large pressure provide significant blockage effect characterized by large particle volume fractions. Unfortunately, traditional drag laws do not address the momentum coupling between gas and solid phase under the condition of particle high volume fraction in high speed blast flows. In order to develop a phenomenological drag model to characterize the momentum coupling between the detonation gas and soil fragments when the soil initially breaks into a dense particulate cloud we conducted a series of numerical simulations on the scale of soil fragments by only considering a small region occupied by a mixture of blast gas and soil fragments (so-called particle-scale simulations). A drag database was constructed based on the drag force collected from the particle-scale simulations under the conditions of various soil volume fractions and particle sizes. A new drag law was developed using data regression technique to characterize the dependency of the drag force exerted on particles as a function of particle volume fraction and Reynolds number based on particle size. The proposed drag law provides satisfactory representations of the simulation data and converge to traditional drag model for isolated particles when the particle volume fraction approaches to zero.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 16, 2013
Accession Number
ADA579356

Entities

People

  • Edward Luke
  • Jian Kang
  • Michael Remotigue
  • Xiaoling Tong

Organizations

  • United States Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Blast Waves
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Couplings
  • Databases
  • Detonations
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Geometry
  • Mach Number
  • Momentum
  • Particle Size
  • Particulates
  • Phase
  • Pressure Distribution
  • Pressure Gradients
  • Reynolds Number
  • Simulations
  • Solid Phases

Readers

  • Aerosol Science/Aerosol Physics
  • Agricultural Chemistry/Soil Science
  • Fluid Dynamics.