Mitigation of exploding-wire-generated blast-waves by aqueous foam

Abstract

In this work, we implement an exploding wire technique to generate small-scale cylindrical blast waves in aqueous foam. The exploding wire system offers an easy to operate and effective tool for studying blast-wave/foam interaction related phenomena in real explosion scenarios. The mitigation of blast waves as a function of the thickness of the foam barrier is discussed and quantified. A fluid mixture pseudo-gas based numerical approach with the aid of the point explosion theory is used to separate the mitigation mechanisms into the near- and the far-field related groups and to analyze the contribution of each group to the overall losses of the blast wave energy.