On the direct construction of the steady traveling solution to high explosive sandwich, cylinder and aquarium tests via a streamline finite volume approximation

Abstract The cylinder, sandwich and aquarium tests are common experiments used to investigate the performance of high explosives. This paper presents a solution technique which simulates these experiments as two dimensional problems in steady traveling coordinates. Using a coordinate system aligned with the streamlines of the flow, an efficient numerical scheme is developed which uses an approximate Riemann solver to model the change in state across streamlines. The technique can also accommodate arbitrary equations of state for the materials. Two verification exercises show that the algorithm converges at second order. Validation studies using the aquarium experiment agreed well with simulations, though the omission of a material strength model leads to some discrepancies between simulation and experiments for the cylinder test. This computational technique is able to predict the behavior of these common high explosive experiments on the order of minutes on a single processor with very fine spatial resolution, on the order of 10 μm.