The implosion of cylindrical shell structures in a high-pressure water environment.

The implosion of cylindrical shell structures in a high-pressure water environment is studied experimentally. The shell structures are made from thin-walled aluminium and brass tubes with circular cross sections and internal clearance-fit aluminium end caps. The structures are filled with air at atmospheric pressure. The implosions are created in a high-pressure tank with a nominal internal diameter of 1.77m by raising the ambient water pressure slowly to a value, Pc, just above the elastic stability limit of each shell structure. The implosion events are photographed with a high-speed digital movie camera, and the pressure waves are measured simultaneously with an array of underwater blast sensors. For the models with larger values of length-to-diameter ratio, L/D0, the tubes flatten during implosion with a two-lobe (mode 2) cross-sectional shape. In these cases, it is found that the pressure wave records scale primarily with Pc and the time scale (where Ri is the internal radius of the tube and is the d...