Abstract
The spatial and temporal distribution of pressure and impulse from explosives buried in saturated cohesive and cohesionless soils has been measured experimentally for the first time. Ten experiments have been conducted at quarter-scale, where localised pressure loading was measured using an array of 17 Hopkinson pressure bars. The blast pressure measurements are used in conjunction with high-speed video filmed at 140,000 fps to investigate in detail the physical processes occurring at the loaded face. Two coarse cohesionless soils and one fine cohesive soil were tested: a relatively uniform sand, a well-graded sandy gravel, and a fine-grained clay. The results show that there is a single fundamental loading mechanism when explosives are detonated in saturated soil, invariant of particle size and soil cohesion. It is also shown that variability in localised loading is intrinsically linked to the particle size distribution of the surrounding soil.
Highlights
Buried improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and landmines are common throughout areas of conflict
Two mean area-integrated impulses and associated relative standard deviation (RSD) have been calculated for Stanag; one pair using the entire dataset and one pair omitting the data from test 6, as the impulse in this test appears to have been substantially increased by several large discrete particle strikes that may not be indicative of the loading across the whole instrumented region
Ten tests were conducted at quarter-scale using three different soils, with orders of magnitude difference between the uniformity and particle size of each: a relatively uniform sand (Leighton Buzzard); a well-graded sandy gravel (Stanag); and clay
Summary
Buried improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and landmines are common throughout areas of conflict. After an explosive material detonates within a soil, the resultant detonation products violently expand and compact the surrounding soil skeleton. This compacted material spalls from the soil surface at supersonic velocities as the detonation products continue to expand and do work on the soil, generating a complex regime of shock waves propagating through, and interacting with, porous, multiphase media [2]. In order to design protective systems to adequately resist the loading arising from buried explosives it is imperative to understand the role that the soil has on the mechanisms and magnitudes of loading in such events
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