METAL ACCELERATION BY MULTI-POINT INITIATION

IN THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF MULTI-POINT INITIATED WARHEAD SYSTEMS CURRENT WORK CENTERS ON FULL-SCALE TESTING OF WARHEADS AND ON THREEDIMENSIONAL HYDROCODE SIMULATION. RECENTLY AT DYNA EAST DEVELOPMENT OF SIMPLE ANALYTICAL MODELS WAS INITIATED TO PROVIDE FIRST-CUT DESIGN TOOLS AND PERFORM PARAMETRIC SENSITIVITY STUDIES. ALL DESIGN TOOLS SUFFER FROM A LACK OF ACCURACY IN PREDICTING THE MACH INTERACTION AND METAL ACCELERATION DUE TO A NON-UNIFORM PRESSURE FIELD. THE OBJECTIVE OF THE PROPOSED PHASE I PROGRAM IS TO DEVELOP A SIMPLE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD FOR ANALYZING THE MACH INTERACTION AND METAL ACCELERATION BY NON-UNIFORM PRESSURE FIELDS IN EXPLOSIVES. A COSTEFFICIENT APPROACH WITH WIDE APPLICABILITY WILL BE SOUGHT SO ALL IMPORTANT EFFECTS CAN BE STUDIED. THE DATA GENERATED FROM THE EXPERIMENTS WILL PROVIDE A MEANS FOR EVALUATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF ANALYTICAL PREDICTIVE TOOLS.