An Experimental Study on the Effects of Burst Pressure on Air Blast Development in a Blast Wave SimulatorParker Zieg1, John Benson1 and Yang Liu1,*1Department of Engineering, East Carolina University,1000 East 5th Street, Slay Hall 218, Greenville, NC 27858, USA&nbsp;*Email: liuya19@ecu.edu&nbsp;Abstract: Due to the extensive use of explosive devices in military conflicts, there has been a dramatic increase of life-threatening injuries and resultant death toll caused by explosive blast. In an attempt to better understand the blast waves and mitigate the damages caused in such blast waves, various devices/systems have been developed to replicate the field blast scenarios in laboratory conditions. The East Carolina University Advanced Blast Wave Simulator (i.e., ECU-ABWS) is one such facility that can reproduce blast waves of various shapes and profiles. Since peak overpressure in a blast is the key factor that causes the greatest amount of damages, which is essentially determined by the burst pressure of blast, a better understanding of the effects of burst pressure on blast generation and development is strongly desired for the development of safer and more efficient blast mitigation technologies. In the present study, a series of experiments are carried out in the ECU-ABWS to characterize the fundamental details of blast wave generation and propagation under different burst pressure conditions. While the incident (side-on) pressures at multiple locations along the blast propagation direction are measured by using a temporally-resolved multi-point pressure sensing system, the time-evolutions of blast wave morphology generated under different burst pressures are also qualitatively revealed by using a high-speed Schlieren imaging system. The synchronization of pressure sensing and Schlieren image acquisition also enables us to extract more physical details of the dynamic blast wave development under different burst pressure conditions by associating the incident pressures and shock wave morphologies. In this study, the different burst pressures are achieved by altering the thickness of the membrane separating the driver section of pressurized gas and the driven section of air at atmospheric pressure. The initial observations suggest that as the burst pressure increases (by increasing the membrane thickness), the peak overpressure is also increased along with the more clearly defined shock wavefront. This study is still ongoing, more details will be provided in the full paper submission.&nbsp;

An Experimental Study on the Effects of Burst Pressure on Air Blast Development in a Blast Wave Simulator

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2021/volume/85284

ASME 2021 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting (FEDSM2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.