Explosive Laboratory Devices for Dynamic Shock Loading of Materials in Mbar Pressure Region

Dynamic methods utilizing strong shock waves are used for investigating the properties of condensed matter at very high pressures and temperatures. Explosive driven plate impact tests have been conducted to find out the shock Hugoniot of materials up to pressure of 2 Mbar. Explosive cascading utilizing overdriven detonation waves in high explosives produced by flyer impact from the first stage to accelerate comparatively thin flyer plates to very high velocities have been demonstrated. Numerical simulations using Autodyn 2D/3D have been performed to optimize the various parameters in two stage explosive assemblies to accelerate flyer to velocities exceeding 10 km/s. Shock pressure up to 20 Mbar has been successfully measured using explosive assemblies in a convergent flow. Expertise and infrastructure available in TBRL for launching metal flyers to high velocity and monitoring its in-flight velocity and profile have been discussed in this paper.