Dimensional Analysis of Impulse Loading Resulting from Detonation of Shallow-Buried Charges
Abstract
Development of military vehicles capable of surviving shallow-buried explosive blast is seldom done using full-scale prototype testing because of the associated prohibitively high cost, the destructive nature of testing, and the requirements for large-scale experimental-test facilities and a large crew of engineers committed to the task. Instead, tests of small-scale models are generally employed and the model-based results are scaled up to the full-size vehicle. In these scale-up efforts, various dimensional analyses are used whose establishment and validation requires major experimental testing efforts and different-scale models. The paper aims to discuss these issues. In the present work, a critical assessment is carried out of some of the most important past efforts aimed at developing the basic dimensional analysis formulation for the problem of impulse loading experienced by target structures (e.g. vehicle hull) due to detonation of explosive charges buried to different depths in sand/soil (of different consistency, porosity, and saturation levels). It was found that the analysis can be substantially simplified if only the physical parameters associated with first-order effects are retained and if some of the sand/soil parameters are replaced with their counterparts which better reflect the role of soil (via the effects of soil compaction in the region surrounding the explosive and via the effects of sand-overburden stretching and acceleration before the associated sand bubble bursts and venting of the gaseous detonation products takes place). Once the dimensional analysis is reformulated, a variety of experimental results pertaining to the total blast impulse under different soil conditions, charge configurations, charge deployment strategies, and vehicle ground clearances are used to establish the underlying functional relations.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2013
- Accession Number
- ADA600482
Entities
People
- B. A. Cheeseman
- Mica Grujicic
- Patrick Glomski
Organizations
- United States Army Research Laboratory