Air Blasts from Cased and Uncased Explosives

The problem of a spherical blast in air is solved using the STUN code. For bare charges, the calculations are shown to be in excellent agreement with previous published results. It is demonstrated that, for an unconfined (uncased) chemical explosive, both range and time to effect scale inversely as the cube root of the yield and directly as the cube root of the ambient air density. It is shown that the peak overpressure decays to roughly 1/10 of ambient pressure in a scaled range of roughly 10 m/kg1/3 at sea level. At a height of 30 km, where the ambient density is a factor of 64 less, the range to the same decay increases to 40 m/kg1/3 . As a direct result of the scaling a single calculation suffices for all charge sizes and altitudes. Although the close-in results are sensitive to the nature of the explosive source and the equation of state of the air, this sensitivity is shown to virtually disappear at scaled ranges > 0.5 m/kg1/3 . For cased explosives the case thickness introduces an additional scale factor. Moreover, when the blast wave arrives at the inner case radius the case begins to expand. Fracture occurs whenmore » a critical value of the resulting hoop strain is reached, causing the case to shatter into fragments. A model is proposed to describe the size distribution of the fragments and their subsequent motion via drag interaction with the explosion products and ambient air. It is shown that a significant fraction of the charge energy is initially transmitted to the case fragments in the form of kinetic energy; for example, a 1 kg spherical charge with a 5 mm thick steel case has almost 29% of the total charge energy as initial kinetic energy of case fragments. This percentage increases with increasing case thickness and decreases with increasing charge size. The peak overpressure at a given range is 70-85% for cased explosives as compared with uncased and the peak impulse per unit area is 90-95%. The peak overpressure and impulse also decrease rapidly with altitude. The effect of the fragments is to increase lethality. Whereas at a scaled range of 10 m/kg1/3 , the peak overpressure is an order of magnitude less than the ambient pressure, the number of fragments per unit area is close to 1 m-2 /kg1/3 , independent of case thickness or altitude. For sufficient ratio of case-to- explosive mass, the number of fragments scales with the cube root of the yield and is independent of case thickness.« less