Reactive Material Dynamic Response & Energy Release

As a special category of energetic materials, reactive materials consist of components which are not generally considered reactive on their own until subjected to a sufficiently strong mechanical, electrical or laser stimulus. As opposed to the traditional warheads, which use inert metal fragments as a means to produce most damage, the reactive fragment warheads release high amount of chemical energy in addition to the kinetic energy so that the total energy on target can be increased by 5 or more times. Energy release of reactive materials is a multiscale multiphysics phenomenon. Although some existing continuum methods did couple thermal, chemical and mechanical energies, lack of physics in various length scales and time scales limits the practical application of such methods. In the proposed method, a multiphysics framework will be constructed through coupling governing equations in heat transfer, chemical reaction and mechanics. Macroscopic properties, such as total release energy, temperature evolution, and quasi-static pressure, will be studied through coupling macroscale with micro and nano scales. Therefore, the proposed method utilizes both multiphysics and multiscale modeling technique to provide a consistent mathematical framework to quantify energy release from a reactive material from a high-speed impact. The algorithm will be finally integrated with a Smooth Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) code of ANSYS or LS-DYNA.