COUPLING IN JOINTED MEDIA

THE PROPOSED RESEARCH WILL PROVIDE A FOCUSED SETOF LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS WHICH WILL HELP TO QUANTIFY SOME OF THE CRITICAL EFFECTS OF JOINTED ROCK MEDIA ON COUPLING OF NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS. THE SELECTION OF A FOCUSED SET OF LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS WILL BE GUIDED BY THE AVAILABLE KNOWLEDGE FROM THE COUPLING COMMUNITY AND A NUMERICAL (FINITE ELEMENT) PARAMETER STUDY SPANNING THE JOINTED MEDIA COUPLING CRITICAL PARAMETERS. IN OUR PROPOSED EFFORT, WE WILL DEMONSTRATE EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL TECHNIQUES FOR MODELING AND PREDICTNG COUPLING EFFECTS IN JOINTED MEDIA. THE CLOSE INTERACTION OF EXPERIMENTSAND NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS IS THE KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL EFFORT: THE EXPERIMENTS PROVIDE BENCHMARKS TO BE USED IN ASSESSING THE FIDELITY OF THE NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS, AND THE NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS PROVIDE AN ECONOMICAL METHOD OF VARYING CRITICAL PARAMETERS BETWEEN AND BEYOND THOSE USED IN THE EXPERIMENTS. ANITICIPATED BENEFITS/POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS - THE NEED FOR THE CAPABILITIES DEVELOPED UNDER THIS SBIRPROPOSAL IS ILLUSTRATED BY THE JOINT VERIFICATION EXPERIMENT (JVE). THE JVE IS CURRENTLY UNDERWAY TO CALIBRATE THE NUCLEAR TEST SITES IN THE USSR, I.E., SEMIPALATINSK AND NOVYA ZEMLYA. THE CURRENT CALIBRATIONPROCESS IS INADEQUATE AT WEAPON YIELDS BELOW ABOUT 10 KT OF TNT EQUIVALENCE. THIS INADEQUACY RENDERS NUCLEAR MONITORING INEFFECTIVE FOR COMPLIANCE WITH A LIMITED TEST BAN TREATY THAT USES 10 KT AS A CEILING ONYIELDS.