Modelling of detonation cellular structure in aluminium suspensions

Abstract

Heterogeneous detonations involving aluminium suspensions have been studied for many years for industrial safety policies, and for military and propulsion applications. Owing to their weak detonability and to the lack of available experimental results on the detonation cellular structure, numerical simulations provide a convenient way to improve the knowledge of such detonations. One major difficulty arising in numerical study of heterogeneous detonations involving suspensions of aluminium particles in oxidizing atmospheres is the modelling of aluminium combustion. Our previous two-step model provided results on the effect on the detonation cellular structure of particle diameter and characteristic chemical lengths. In this study, a hybrid model is incorporated in the numerical code EFAE, combining both kinetic and diffusion regimes in parallel. This more realistic model provides good agreement with the previous two-step model and confirms the correlations found between the detonation cell width, and particle diameter and characteristic lengths. Moreover, the linear dependence found between the detonation cell width and the induction length remains valid with the hybrid model.