George C. Butler

Cylindrical converging shock initiation of reactive materials

Recent research has been conducted that builds on the Forbes et al. (1997) study of inducing a rapid solid state reaction in a highly porous core using a converging cylindrical shock driven by a high explosive. The high explosive annular charge used in this research to compress the center reactive core was comparable to PBXN-110. Some modifications were made on the physical configuration of the test item for scale-up and ease of production. The reactive materials (I2O5/Al and I2O5/Al/Teflon) were hand mixed and packed to a tap density of about 32 percent. Data provided by a Cordon 114 high speed framing camera and a Photon Doppler Velocimetry instrument provided exit gas expansion, core particle and cylinder wall velocities. Analysis indicates that the case expansion velocity differs according to the core formulation and behaved similar to the baseline high explosive core with the exit gas of the reactive materials producing comparable velocities. Results from CTH hydrocode used to model the test item com...

The miniaturization and reproducibility of the cylinder expansion test

The cylinder test (aka cylinder expansion or Cylex test) is a standard way to measure the Gurney velocity and determine the JWL coefficients of an explosive and has been utilized by the explosives community for many years. More recently, early time shock information has been found to be useful in examining the early pressure-time history during the expansion of the cylinder. Work in the area of nanoenergetics has prompted Air Force researchers to develop a miniaturized version of the Cylex test, for materials with a sufficiently small critical diameter, to reduce the cost and quantity of material required for the test. This paper discusses the development of a half-inch diameter version of the Cylex test. A measurement systems analysis of the new miniaturized and the standard one-inch test has been performed using the liquid explosive PLX (nitromethane sensitized with ethylene diamine). The resulting velocity and displacement profiles obtained from the streak records were compared to Photo Doppler Velocim...