Three-dimensional cellular structure of detonations in suspensions of aluminium particles

Abstract

Recently, we have used scarce available data on the detonation cell size in suspensions of aluminium particles in air and oxygen to adjust the kinetic parameters of our two-phase model of detonations in these mixtures. The calculated detonation cell width was derived by means of two-dimensional (2D) unsteady simulations using an assumption of cylindrical symmetry of the flow in the tube. However, in reality, the detonation cells are three-dimensional (3D). In this work, we have applied the same detonation model which is based on the continuous mechanics of two-phase flows, for 3D numerical simulations of cellular detonation structures in aluminium particle suspensions in oxygen. Reasonable agreement on the detonation cell width was obtained with the aforementioned 2D results. The range of tube diameters where detonations in $$\text{ Al/O}_2$$ mixture at a given particle size and concentration would propagate in the spinning mode has been estimated (these results make a complement to our previous analysis of spinning detonations in Al/air mixtures). Coupling these results with the dependencies of detonation cell size on the mean particle diameter is of great interest for the understanding of fundamental mechanisms of detonation propagation in solid particle suspensions in gas and can help to better guide the experimental studies of detonations in aluminium suspensions. It is shown that the part of detonation wave energy used for transverse kinetic energy of both gas and particles is quite small, which explains why the propagation velocity of spinning and multi-headed detonations reasonably agrees with the ideal CJ values.