Testing and evaluation of the thermal damage caused by an explosion of energetic materials

Abstract

With the rapid development of the new generation of energetic materials, the testing and evaluation of the damage caused by these materials in an explosion has received much attention worldwide. To assess the thermal damage caused by an explosion of the energetic materials quantitatively, a system to measure the thermal effects is constructed with self-developed heat flux sensors. An evaluation model based on nonlinear regression is proposed. Static explosion tests of both bare TNT grains and typical thermobaric explosives are carried out under the same test conditions. The heat flux is acquired at different distances from the explosion by the contact heat flow density sensors based on the infrared principle. The thermal doses are obtained by integrating the heat flux. Based on the similarity principle for explosions, two basic evaluation models are established for TNT. The TNT equivalent of equal effect, which is utilized to assess the thermal damage of a typical thermobaric explosive, is calculated by substituting the thermal dose and the distance from the explosion center into the basic evaluation model, established for TNT. In our experiments, the maximum errors of the two TNT basic evaluation models are 14.12% and 12.18%, respectively, which can meet the accuracy requirements of an engineering test assessment of the thermal damage caused by an explosion of energetic materials for proportional distances within the range from 1.1672 to 2.280 m according to the test data.