Publications Details

Reactive Burn Model Calibration for Vapor Deposited Hexanitrostilbene and Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate Films Using XHVRB

Stewart, James A.; Kittell, David E.; Tappan, Alexander S.; Knepper, Robert A.; Damm, David L.; Bassett, William P.; Tuttle, Leah W.

The eXtended History Variable Reactive Burn (XHVRB) model is parameterized for hexanitrostilbene (HNS) and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) based on data collected from a series of high-throughput initiation (HTI) experiments. The HTI experiment has generated a wealth of thin-pulse, sub-millimeter shock initiation data for a variety of vapor deposited explosive films. This is because it provides access to growth-to-detonation information for explosives that exhibit a shock-to-detonation transition (SDT) with length and time scales that are too short to be resolved by conventional experiments. The XHVRB model was selected because previous work has shown that simpler, homogeneous reactive burn models (RBMs) were incapable of reproducing the particle velocity buildup observed in experiments with heterogeneous explosives. Therefore, calibrated XHVRB models are developed in an attempt to capture the heterogeneous behavior not captured previously and to assess the models’ ability to capture the SDT across multiple explosive film thicknesses.