Blast enhancement from metalized explosives

Experiments are carried out to determine the effects of particle size and mass loading on the free-field blast wave from spherical, constant volume metalized explosive charges. The charges are comprised of gelled nitromethane with uniformly embedded aluminum, magnesium, or glass particles. Particle sizes are varied over an order of magnitude with particle mass fractions up to 50%. Peak blast overpressures are directly measured within the fireball with piezoelectric pressure gauges and outside the fireball are inferred by tracking the velocity of the blast wave and using the Rankine–Hugoniot relation. With the addition of inert particles, the peak blast overpressure is initially mitigated, but then recovers in the far field. For charges with reactive particles, the particles react promptly with oxidizers in the detonation products and release energy as early as within the first few hundred microseconds in all cases. The particle energy release enhances the peak blast overpressures in the far field by up to twice the values for a constant volume charge of the baseline homogenous explosive. By plotting the peak blast overpressure decay as a function of energy-scaled distance, it is inferred that at least half of the particle energy release contributes to the blast overpressure in the far field of higher mass loadings, and nearly all of the particle energy for a particle mass fraction of 10%. For aluminum, the blast augmentation is not a systematic function of particle size. This observation implies that conventional models for particle combustion that depend on particle surface area are not appropriate for describing the rapid aluminum reaction that occurs in the extreme conditions within the detonation products, which influences the blast wave propagation.