Investigation of the confinement effects on the blast wave propagated from gas mixture detonation utilizing the CESE method with finite rate chemistry model

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, we investigate the effect of confinement on the explosion characteristic of a certain volume of a gas mixture in an environment. Instead of using the equivalent weight of TNT, we use a computational fluid dynamics method with a reduced chemical kinetic mechanism to simulate the gas mixture detonation. In this method, reacting flow equations including realistic finite-rate chemistry models are solved by employing the space-time conservation element and solution element (CESE). To evaluate the accuracy of the kinetic mechanism and the validity of the simulation of the volumetric explosions, including the blast wave propagation and its interaction with the walls, the explosion of a certain volume of stoichiometric propane/oxygen mixture in a semi-confined volume is investigated and the numerical results are compared with an experimental data. The excellent agreement between the numerical results and the experimental data indicates that it is possible to predict the behavior of the blast wave generated by the detonation of a gas mixture in a relatively complex environment accurately by using appropriate chemical kinetics. Therefore, we have used this method to investigate the effects of confinement on the blast wave propagation caused by gas detonation in more detail.