Small-scale laboratory measurement and simulation of a thermal precursor shock

A shock precursor in a thin thermal layer above a 3000 K hot surface is measured in a small-scale laboratory experiment. Precursor and thermal layer characteristics are diagnosed using spectroscopy, interferometry, and dark-field shadowgraphy. The experiment is successfully simulated with a code previously validated using large-scale high-explosive tests, thereby demonstrating its applicability to events that differ in energy by 12 orders of magnitude. The simulation shows that a small-scale laboratory experiment can be a good surrogate for infrequent, expensive, and hard to diagnose large-scale tests.